


Panem et Circenses

by Heather



Category: Hunger Games Series - All Media Types, due South
Genre: Alternate Universe - Hunger Games Setting, Angst and Humor, Canonical Character Death, Cliffhangers, F/F, F/M, Gen, M/M, Minor Character Death, Minor Violence, POV Alternating, To Be Continued, aged-down characters
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-06
Updated: 2014-10-13
Packaged: 2018-02-17 08:16:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 18
Words: 76,602
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2302844
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Heather/pseuds/Heather
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When the Ludus Magnus of District Four burns down, claiming the lives of almost all of the students in it, Victoria Metcalf's life takes a turn she never expected. The Eighty-First Annual Hunger Games are coming, and her district does not have enough children of age to go around. With the Reaping approaching, and the government pressure on, she finds herself cornered into volunteering- along with her philosophical enemy, the Peacekeeper's son, Benton Fraser.</p><p>Meanwhile, around the country, the Reaping claims Tributes in each district that no one could've predicted. There's something sinister going on, beneath the garishness of the press tour and the usual ghastliness of the Games.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

In the middle of the night, a week before the Reaping, Victoria wakes to the sound of bells.

There is no such thing in District Four as bells of the musical sort- if her people ever made music, it was a thousand years ago, when they were something else- something warmer, happier; less beaten. Nearly all of the bells of District Four are specialized, and most serve a particular function. Four chimes for work; three for meals; one booming brass sound that could crack open the face of the Earth if you wanted it to, the sound of each night's curfew.

Even in her haze of being abruptly and recently roused from deep sleep, her instinct is to listen, and to count. 

_One._

She opens her eyes and can already see signs of the district starting to wake up. In the distance, lights are turning on in the city square, where the rich people live and have electricity to make beacons in the dark. One chime from the soft bells can be anything; a special message from the Capitol, a Peacekeeper crackdown, the desperate plea of a wounded person who’s been attacked by the wolves that live outside the fence. None of Victoria’s affair, unless official searches call for hunts through the trees now. (They very well might. Strange things happen when the Reaping is coming.)

_Two._

Two means the coming of a storm, the signal for District Four’s hundreds of fishermen to tie up their boats and protect their equipment. Her body reacts to this on autopilot without her, sitting up in the branches of her white oak tree, unzipping her sleeping bag and unclipping her safety straps to allow herself to climb down. She can ride it out in the district’s shelter for the homeless old this time, she thinks. Get started early on this year’s tessera. Eat it hot for once. 

Distantly, she’s aware of a warm breeze- unseasonable this time of year in Four’s frozen north- which carries on it the smell of wood smoke, and she thinks perhaps someone got to that idea ahead of her.

_Three._

As Victoria slings her meager belongings over her shoulder and begins her descent, some small worry manages to creep in. It’s too dark, too early, for the breakfast bells. 

_Four._

And by her best reckoning, at least an hour to go before the fisheries open.

_Five._

By the time Victoria reaches the lowest branch on her tree, the long fat one that dangles over the fence, letting her jump down and pretend to have been here all along, she can see that the rest of the district is beginning to buzz with activity. Peacekeepers in hard, white plastisteel uniforms are going from house to house, pounding on doors to wake anyone who might have somehow slept through the bells, only to be greeted by wide-eyed and fully dressed people. They say to them something she cannot hear, but which is enough to send men, women, and children scarpering for town, like rabbits flushed from their warren. 

Victoria does not know what this emergency is, but she corners around the Peacekeepers to follow everyone else anyway, a feeling of mounting dread ballooning inside her stomach and up her throat like smoldering steel. The people of District Four are not known for their harmony and unanimity. Only the most dire of crises could send the poor fishers of the Outer Ring fleeing to the Merchant Circle in a frenzy of helpfulness to aid their neighbors. 

The bells are still chiming, but Victoria has lost count in the chaos and her own confusion. Stupid, she thinks. How does she know what she’ll find on the other side without their exact number? What does she think she’s going to do if she doesn’t know? How does she even know it’s anything she ought to be getting involved with? Just because the Peacekeepers think so?

Scowling, she berates herself for the foolishness of a moment’s distraction all the way to the Merchant’s Circle, and only remembers to be afraid again when she sees that it is not, in fact, where the people are running. They’re fleeing somewhere beyond, in the direction of the Great Wall, and the heavy steel sensation in Victoria’s belly shifts to pierce her in the heart. She stuffs the bag of her belongings under a merchant’s porch so she can run more quickly to the scene of the crisis, to see for herself what she is beginning to fear- and worse, what she thinks she is beginning to smell.

The Great Wall beyond the edge of the Merchant’s Circle is a monstrous thing, taller than any three men in District Four if they stood on each other’s shoulders. (That reckoning, she sees upon her arrival, is accurate; there are men trying to climb over it in exactly that configuration.) To Victoria, it seems to be made of billions of bricks, in every imaginable kind, from the cheapest river stones that could be dug from the ground here in Four to the most stately granite that could be carried in from the quarries of District Two. For all its patchwork appearance, the Wall is a magnificent thing, as solid as it is tall and nearly a fourth as thick, designed to protect from thieves and spies the most precious commodity in District Four, even more precious than the wild-caught salmon and crabs, and farm-raised tuna and carp that is the district’s life blood. It sits on the edge of a deep bowl of land, a man-made valley of absurd proportions that displaced over a hundred farmers back when it was built, a loss from which the district has never quite recovered. 

Rising up from that bowl, where Victoria couldn’t see from her perch in the near-wilderness, is curling smoke and licks of flame.

Ludus Magnus, the proud champion school from which the Tributes for the Hunger Games are raised for the Reaping, is burning.

All around Victoria, there is so much rushing and noise, she barely knows where to even begin trying to help. There are children crying, parents screaming, people of all ages and sizes hammering fruitlessly at the Great Wall with whatever they could find, trying to chip it away while others rush to form a bucket chain that will be useless if they can’t get someone over or through the Wall. 

Peacekeepers are shouting into their handheld communicators, calling for men, calling for water, calling for hovercraft from the nearest station in the wilderness that has any to spare. District Four is so cold, with an embarrassment of water three times the supply of any other district; so long has it been kept warm with solar and geothermal heating, rather than gas or coal or electricity. Fire is unthinkable. It is the one emergency for which they are woefully unprepared. And it is devouring the one location in all the district that no one knows how to breach- even to save its inhabitants’ lives.

A hand on her shoulder sends Victoria nearly leaping out of her skin, and when she turns, it is with dismay that she recognizes it as belonging to the Peacekeeper Fraser. Victoria has a poor history with Peacekeepers in general- she’s been caught too many times shoplifting and raiding merchants’ garbage for food- but Fraser is one of the ones that likes her least. Too much trouble; belongs in the Children's Home. She can see it in his eyes every time he speaks to her.

She half-expects him to accuse her of starting the fire when he opens his mouth to- incredibly- bark at her a question.

"Girl!" He shouts an inch away from her face, the only way he can be heard above the din. "You know how to climb, don't you?"

Victoria bites off a sarcastic response before it can make its way out of her mouth. He's only arrested her for climbing over the district fence a dozen times; of course he knows she can climb. She nods her head.

"Can you climb this?" He gestures, wide and sweeping, at the length of the wall.

Victoria wants to say no. The wall face is sheer, with none of the handholds and footholds of the district's chainlink security fence, nor the clingy texture of the bark of the tree where she sleeps. Most of the town kids hammering at it with shovels and backhoes would declare it impossible.

It isn't. She's done it before.

"I think so," she says. "I can try."

Fraser actually pats her on the head. "There's a good girl," he says. "Lead the way."

For a moment, the strangeness of being told by a Peacekeeper- especially _this_ Peacekeeper- to lead the way overrides awareness of the possible consequences of losing the Tribute school, so that Victoria nearly turns tail and runs. She is not a leader of any kind, and she is only sixteen years old. She doesn't want any part of this; she wants someone older and in charge to deal with it so she can hide. 

But his eyes are fixed on her, firm and strangely trusting, as if he thinks she might be made of something brave or honorable, something secretly self-sacrificing that might compel her to help the district's rich kids in their time of need. 

Victoria has always hated to disappoint people who think the better of her.

"I need a crabbing net," she says.

"This is a hell of a time to consider a future in fishing," the Peacekeeper says, but he taps the shoulder of the other- Frobisher, she thinks he's called- and relays her request. She has her net in less than a minute.

Finding a niche in the wall that no one is swarming over takes longer. Victoria is not sure how many families she passes that are still desperately trying to claw themselves a way to their children. One woman has scraped so hard trying to pull it apart with her nails that she's torn her own skin off, and her fingertips are nothing so much as bloody mush. The fact that there are no younger children helping her makes Victoria think that her only child is trapped in the school. She can't help but wonder, a little harshly, why anyone would ever enroll an only child.

When she finally finds a blank stretch of wall, it takes her and the Peacekeeper both to heave the crabbing net high enough to get it over the edge. It is a large net, of the sort used with heavy cranes in deep water, not the little nets cast by two or three men in small boats in the bay, and it weighs nearly twice as much as Victoria herself does. It still isn't quite long enough to reach all the way down, on either side, but its strong loops and overall heft make it a serviceable ladder when another isn't available. (The hazards of life in District Four, where houses are built short but wide for fear of sinking- there’s not a ladder in the territory that’d be tall enough.)

Victoria begins to scale it once it's over the edge- a simple enough trick, even without anywhere to put her feet- but the Peacekeeper stops her with a hand on her shoulder. Sanity seems to have sunk in with him at last. He motions her to the ground.

"Good enough, girl," he says. (Victoria wonders if he has forgotten her name.) "I can take it from here."

Victoria sizes him up with her eyes- he's tall and slightly built, not so heavy that he'll bring the net crashing back down the moment he gets some height in the climb, but he's more than old enough to be her father, and his hands don't have the curves or callouses of climbing rocks and trees. She's sure he'll tire himself out quickly just in the attempt, and she doubts that he has even the faintest clue what he is doing. 

All the same, she steps back and lets him try. As little as she wants the school to be lost, she wants even less to be the hero who goes into the fire herself. He volunteered to be a Peacekeeper; he can risk himself if he likes.

To her surprise, he manages to get himself up to the top of the wall, and she's just thinking of going up after him so she can see what happens next when he slips and pulls the net down to the ground on the other side with him. She isn't sure which of them landed first.

The thud on the other side sounds heavy and painful, and as if the Peacekeeper has had all the breath knocked out of him in one great _oof._ Victoria winces a little at the thought of how it must feel.

"I'm all right, I'm all right!" the Peacekeeper calls to her, as if he thinks she'll worry. His voice sounds heavy and strained, and the sentence is punctuated with loud, huffing pants as if his lungs are fighting him on his definition of _all right._ "Get Frobisher- tell him I'll have the first wounded out in a moment!" 

Victoria doubts that it'll be just a moment- this set up with the net is ideal for getting over the wall if that's all you want to do, but it's not adapted to the possibility of trying to do so when carrying another person's weight- but she does what she's told. Frobisher swears, and follows her back to her spot, running all the way and barking requests into his communicator, still hoping to raise any kind of assistance from the stations in the woods that haven't yet answered.

They stand at the base of the wall, watching and waiting for him for what seems like either microseconds or an eternity, Victoria isn't sure which, before anything happens. She hears the Peacekeeper's breathing again on the other side, hears him grunting and groaning, and the thuds as he pitches the net two, three, four times at the wall, trying to get it to stick. It won't take hold.

"I think we best help him, don't you?" Frobisher asks her, a kind of calm joviality to his voice that sets Victoria's teeth on edge. She loathes people who think it's their duty to be cheery even in the worst of disasters. Who do they even think that's helping?

She nods anyway, and before she knows it, he has her about the waist, lifting her up over his head to try and reach the wall. Victoria barely stifles a shriek, wobbling in the air, until he staggers towards the wall and holds her against the stone edifice. Her hands slide wildly around the surface, trying to find even the tiniest uneven piece she can use to grab, when Frobisher squeezes her tighter and lifts her higher. No- _he_ doesn't lift her; when she looks back over her shoulder, she sees that another Peacekeeper has come to his aid and has grabbed Frobisher about the legs, lifting up both of their weights while his eyes bulge and his face turns red with the strain. 

Victoria sets her teeth and squirms her way between Frobisher and the wall, her human perch shifting unsteadily as she steps up his abdomen and chest and onto his shoulders. She's still not high enough to reach.

Damn it all. 

She grits her teeth, closes her eyes, and jumps.

The wall slams into her chest exactly the way a giant stone wall should, and it is only by instinct that she is able to grab the edge before she goes tumbling back towards the ground. Her arms burn with the strain of trying to hold herself up, and her legs are flailing about on autopilot, desperately seeking support that her conscious mind cannot convince her body it won't find. Her eyes are starting to tear. She's going to fall. She's certain of it. She's going to fall and this entire thing will have been fruitless from the start. The school will be lost and then the Reaping will happen, and--

The edge of the net appears at the top of the wall, inches away from her hands. Victoria is distantly aware that it's not meant for her, she's meant to grab it just to keep it from falling, and perhaps act as a counterweight while the Peacekeeper climbs up with an injured child. She doesn't care. She takes the edge with sweet relief, and hangs on it. It slides over until she is standing on Frobisher again, who groans under her sudden weight but holds her steady, not wanting the net to slip away from his partner.

Then, just as suddenly, he has to hold her by her ankles so that she isn't dragged over.

Victoria's eyes are still tearing, her arms are still burning, and she feels as though she is going to be torn in half between the weight of two Peacekeepers, one yanking on her only handhold and the other pulling on her feet so hard that there are pins and needles tingling along her arches, the blood squeezed clean out of them. She clenches her teeth and lets out a sharp groan of pain and effort, and promises herself that never, ever again is she going to be tricked into doing anything remotely noble by someone with a trusting look.

The Peacekeeper climbs over at last, his face as strained as her own, with a girl no older but much, much bigger than Victoria slung over his shoulder. The state of her nearly makes Victoria vomit.

Arms and legs, face and chest, all burned to the pink of cooked salmon, with open wounds oozing blood and pus from blisters that have burst as quickly as they formed. Her hair is singed and reeks like scorched coffee grounds and wet dog. If it weren't for the lavender color of her burned nightgown, Victoria doubts she'd have even recognized her as a girl.

The Peacekeeper jumps to the ground once he's over the wall- the girl cries out from the force of the landing, the first indicator Victoria's seen that she's still alive- and he rushes to lie her tenderly on the ground. 

Soon people see them, and they're rushing over. To help, to ask questions, to look at the wounded child and make sure that she isn't theirs- Victoria doesn't know. What she does know is that the words "Splendid, Bob! Beautifully done!" are barely out of Frobisher's mouth before the Peacekeeper has turned and ran to the wall and started back up the net again.

He makes the journey four more times.

He brings back child after child- teens, really, most of them Victoria's own age, or near enough to it. Each one is hurt worse than the last, and each time, the Peacekeeper looks worse for the wear- his uniform stained, then scorched, then barely hanging on in pieces, while he coughs like he's going to puke up his own lungs and his face smears over and over with soot until all that's clearly recognizable is those trusting blue eyes.

Victoria thinks that she might throw up.

On the fifth journey, Fraser comes back with a little girl who's so far gone that she's dead before she's even over the wall, and burns so bad that he himself falls down in the snow, coughing blood and shivering as if there's ice in his bones. Frobisher falls down next to him, frantically reassuring, while the other Peacekeeper runs to find even one damn doctor who can clean up this mess.

"Buck," the Peacekeeper whispers, sightless, his eyes fixed in her direction instead of his partner's. It sends a chill down Victoria's spine and she wraps her arms around herself to keep from trembling. 

"The doctor's on his way," Frobisher says. "It'll be all right. We'll have you fixed up in no time."

"No time," he echoes, with a laugh that turns into another bloody cough.

Victoria doesn't want to be here, doesn't want to see this. It's too personal, too private, and far too much. 

"No time at all," Frobisher repeats, his voice firm and dementedly chipper. She would hate him if his face matched it.

"Buck," he says again, his burned and bloodied hand reaching out to him. 

Frobisher grabs it, just as quickly lets it go when it makes Fraser wince. "You probably oughtn't talk, Bob. Give your lungs a rest."

Fraser shakes his head, or tries to as much as his ruined body will let him. "Buck- the Games. The Games..."

For a moment, Victoria is overcome with disgust. Leave it to the Capitol types to be worried, even on their deathbeds, about whether their Games will go off without a hitch. Her lips purse and her teeth set, and she doesn't know whether she wants to vomit or spit. 

But Fraser looks past Frobisher, at her, at the other children being clung to by sobbing parents, at something that maybe Victoria can't see, and he looks with such despair that he seems broken. Beaten. "The children," he elaborates weakly.

Frobisher is as confused as Victoria, and attempts concerned resolve. "You did the best you could," he says. "Now you have to rest."

"The Games," Fraser rasps, and despite how much it obviously pains him, he gets fistfuls of Frobisher's uniform and forces himself to get it out. "What will happen--" He clenches his teeth with a sharp pained noise, and tries again. "What- what will happen... with the children who are left... in the Games?" He sinks down into the snow, coughing again. Curling in on himself, like the pain is a den he can squeeze into without getting any on him. "Buck... what will happen to our children if there's no one to volunteer?"

Frobisher looks stricken. He tries to keep calm. "You can't worry about that now--"

"Then when?" he asks, faintly laughing. "If not now, then when?"

Frobisher is silent.

Fraser looks at Victoria again, and this time, she's sure he sees her. That it's deliberate. "What will happen?" he whispers. "What will... become of them now?"

For the first time since this awful night began, Victoria is hit by a realization that makes her just as sick as the wounds from the fire. More, even, since she can't look away from this. As frantic as he's been to save the children in the school, he's had another intention all along. Maybe it's not bigger or truer than his intentions to save them, but it's bigger and truer than Victoria can stand. 

He went over the wall and into that fire to save her, too. And the others like her. The children who've never set foot in an arena, and thought that they would never have to. The ones who have taken their tessera, entered their names in over and over, sure that there would never be a real lottery. Sure that they were safe from the Hunger Games.

Victoria is certain she's going to throw up. 

Frobisher has no words for Fraser, no answer to his terrible question. What could help him now? Certainly no promises can be made that everything's going to be _fine._ "Fine" exited the vocabulary of District Four's residents approximately eighty Hunger Games ago, and hasn't had any cause to come back since. 

"Thank you," is what Frobisher says, and as ridiculous and inadequate as it seems to Victoria, it seems to do the trick.

Fraser closes his eyes and curls into himself more. Victoria feels like she's watching him live his life backwards, as though he's becoming smaller and smaller. Maybe he'll shrink down, she thinks hysterically, until he's too small to see, and then shrink more until he's simply rewound himself out of existence.

He lets go of a breath and turns his face into the snow. He doesn't take another one.

By the time the sun has come back up, the Tribute school is no more. Ten more of the kids inside have been pulled out by someone who figured out some way to get the wall's mechanical gate to open, but three of the four that Fraser saved have died. A district that yesterday had a hundred potential champions is left now with less than twenty, all untrained and half-starved. 

For the first time in her life, Victoria is one of them.

The firestarter, an academy washout called Greta Garbo who's never been quite right in the head, is located by the afternoon. Victoria wants to hate her and what she's done with all of her heart, but she finds there's not enough room in her feelings for the big dumb girl who's doomed them all to matter to her. She's too afraid.

Rumor has it that when they asked her why she did it, Greta burst into giggles and said, "No more Careers." When Victoria hears that, she wants to let out a mad giggle of her own. That's certainly true.

 _What's going to become of the children of District Four when there aren't any volunteers?_

Maybe, Victoria thinks, huddled alone in her white oak tree, they'll all shrink down and disappear.


	2. Chapter 2

_District Twelve_

If Ray Vecchio hates anything as much as coal dust, he doesn't know what it is. The damn crap's everywhere, not just tracked on the floors and stained on the walls, it's settled itself all the way into his Goddamn skin. It's impossible to get clean in District Twelve, but every year, in the days leading up to the Reaping, his mother tries. 

" _Ma_ ," Frannie whines as the wire scrub brush is dragged up and down her back in the wooden tub on the living room floor, "don't scrub so _hard._ Why do I have to have a bath? I'm not even big enough to go to the Reaping."

Maria rolls her eyes, straining water out of her long brown hair, her bath already over. "Everybody has to look good at the Reaping, stupid," she says. 

"Don't talk to your sister like that," Ma says, without any real feeling behind it. She's drifted out into space a bit, and Ray knows that means she's worried. She's got three this year old enough for the Reaping, and only one more year before it's four. (Four, assuming that there aren't any picked for the Games this year. Ma's not the only one that's worried.)

Ray looks at his suit for the Reaping with a kind of wistful feeling. It's a nice suit, white and gray with a real silk necktie in a bold paisley pattern that can make him dizzy if he looks at it too long. He'd like to be able to wear it for some occasion other than lining up to maybe get slaughtered if his name's drawn out of the Capitol's crystal ball. But no. Ma's firm. Reaping clothes are kept wrapped in plastic three hundred and sixty-three days a year. They're brought out the day before to be aired out and brushed off, and put back in the armoire the second the lottery is over. Ray's suit used to be his dad's Reaping suit, and it gets an extra day to air out on account of how long it's been locked up in the wardrobe. It hangs in the window like a taunt, mercilessly tantalizing him with the possibilities of school fairs and district weddings he could go to without looking like a homeless kid for once. If his mother weren't so determined to keep it nice for the stupid Reaping, anyway.

Ma rings a wet towel out over Frannie's head, washing away the thin coat of soap in her hair while Frannie howls about water in her eyes, and then declares her clean enough, for now. "I give you another one tomorrow," Ma says, like she does every year. Like three days of baths are really enough to make her children perfect for the Reaping. Like being perfect for the Reaping really matters, 'cause people are going to think she's a bad mother for letting her kids just look like they do on what may be the last normal day of their lives. 

He shakes himself. Whatever. It’s the way things are. Ray just wishes that she didn't have such a moratorium on wasting water and wearing out nice clothes every other day of the year.

"Raimundo," Ma says, "is your turn. Get in the tub."

"Oh, no," he says. "I'm old enough to take a bath by myself, Ma. I don't need an audience to scrub my toes. I'd just as soon go without than do it in public, thanks."

His mother glares at him. "You will not," she says. "You going to go out there fresh as a baby, or you not going to go out there at all."

"Great," Ray says. "Not going is even better. Thanks, Ma." 

Her eyes narrow and she chucks a bar of soap at his head. Ray narrowly ducks.

"Why you gotta be difficult?" she asks. "Is not hard enough?" She gestures at his brother and sisters, then him, then folds her arms across her chest. "I got four children, for bad time, and the only one who gotta make it worse is you."

_Bad time._ It's the closest his mother has ever come to criticizing the Hunger Games. Ray feels a little guilty. 

"Sorry, Ma," he says. 

His guilt is made worse by how stricken his mother looks, as if she's just realized she committed the cardinal sin of speaking sharply to one of her children when he's possibly about to go to his death. She runs a palm through his hair, as wispy and fine-textured a black as her own, with a look like she's assessing him for damage. Her children are the most precious things she has, and she's terrified of losing or breaking one.

Ray fidgets uncomfortably. "I'll take a bath later, okay, Ma?" he offers.

"Water will go cold," she warns, but her voice has that faraway sound to it again. She's already slipped into a haze of frightening daymares about what's going to happen tomorrow. 

Ray shrugs. "Eh. Cold'll do me some good." He hopes, anyway; cold water is such a part of his daily life that if it's bad for him, he's already screwed. 

Ma nods. "Fine," she says. "Whatever you say." She steps away from him and heads for the back bedroom she shares with his father, muttering quietly to herself, and Ray suspects that she's getting out her rosary. He doesn't really understand what the beaded thing is or why it helps her, but if it keeps her mind off of the Reaping and getting him into a bath, so much the better for him.

"I'm going out," he says, to no one in particular, before he starts putting on his shoes.

"Ma will kill you," Maria informs him flatly. There's no real element of warning to it; just a statement of facts. 

Ray rolls his eyes. "Ma, I'm going out!" he yells, loud enough to be heard in the entire house- and probably the houses on either side of theirs and the worms in the dirt for good measure.

"Okay!" His mother's voice calls back hoarsely, and Ray has the sick feeling that she's probably crying. He shudders and grabs his jacket off its peg on the wall.

"Where are you going?" Frannie asks.

"None of your business," Ray says, buttoning his coat.

"To see your girlfriend?" Frannie guesses shrewdly, with a teasing singsong in her tone that sounds younger than her years. You'd think, by eleven, she'd have grown up a little, but no such luck.

"So what if I am?" Ray asks, quirking his brows at her in the way that most reliably gets a giggle from his baby sister. "You wanna make something out of it?"

Frannie giggles up a storm, squirming from her own laughter like a puppy that's about to pee on the rug, and she has to brace herself with the wall to keep from falling over. Maria looks less amused.

"You're not supposed to go over there," she says. "Pop said--"

"Yeah, well, Pop's not here," Ray cuts her off. If Ray remembers his father's schedule correctly- and why shouldn't he, when it hasn't changed once in Ray's sixteen years?- Pop's off in the Hob, gambling away whatever he didn't lose yesterday, and won't be back for hours. If the old man's got a problem with where he goes, he can try being home more often.

Maria shakes her head. "You're gonna get in trouble," she says.

"Who cares?" he asks. "You?"

"What if I do?" Maria asks, giving him a challenging look that reminds him of his own. _You wanna make something out of it?_

"Then you're outta luck," Ray says. "Go help Ma, would ya? Quit being nosy."

Maria gives him a skeptical look. "Go help Ma do what?" 

"I dunno," Ray says. He sticks his long, skinny arms out to his sides, gesturing at the whole house in one long swing. "Sweep something."

He's not sure, but he thinks he hears Maria mutter something about places she could stick a broom if he really wants her to. He chooses not to engage, instead walking out the door into the lane. 

The path from the Seam into the more metropolitan (for certain values of "metropolitan") areas of District Twelve is long and crookedy, and this time of year, given over almost completely to mud. Ray winces a little at the squelching it makes under his shoes as he walks, and he knows for a fact that his mother is going to make him scrub them tonight before he goes to bed. He may have a good suit for the Reaping, but he's only got the one pair of shoes. Wryly, he wonders if he can convince Irene to sneak him a spare pair out of Frankie's closet, save him some trouble later tonight. He's got a hundred pairs he's never worn, anyway- it wouldn't be like _actually_ wearing Frankie's shoes.

Probably not. Irene wouldn't mind, but Frankie will beat the tar out of Ray's little brother if he finds out. Frankie's possessive of his stuff that way.

Ray opts to take his shoes off instead, and just ignore the waves of disgust he feels from squelching around in his bare feet.

Irene's house used to be out here in the Seam- across the lane and four doors down from his own, a quick and easy trip that wouldn't gum his shoes up so bad, even in this mud. Now, of course, she's out two or three miles in the gated-off ghost town that is District Twelve's Victor's Village.

The Victor's Village would probably be beautiful, if more than two families lived in it. Without enough people to maintain it for, the twelve houses in it are all allowed to fall into disrepair. The lawns are overgrown, and many of the roofs have been taken over by ivy and kudzu. Once a year, the Capitol sends a team out to make it all pretty, usually in the month after the Reaping, when the press wants to talk to the previous winners and their families. By Ray's count, it's still about a week away before they show up to talk to Mr. and Mrs. Zuko about the miraculous victory of their son.

Miraculous, Ray thinks, with a bitter shake of his head. That's one word for it, he guesses. A better one would be "hid until it was almost all over and then killed all the little kids when the big ones went down in a bunch of accidents." Though he supposes that that would be harder to fit in a headline. Headlines were important in the Capitol. So was being the kind of underdog who comes out swinging, even if what they're swinging at are even smaller underdogs. That kind of thing made you a real darling up there, made the press and the nitwits out in the Capitol real fond of you.

Ray... isn't real fond of Frankie.

When he gets to the Village, Irene's already waiting for him, shelling some peas on the porch to help out with dinner for the family. The sight makes him smile a little, at how the money and the fame hasn't gone to her head the way it's gone to her dumbass brother's, even if it confuses him. If Ray had the kind of money that the Zukos have, he'd hire somebody from town or the Seam to do all the cooking forever, and save his ma the trouble. 

"Hey, you," Irene says when she spots him, giving him that smile of hers that still makes him light-headed every time. He's not sure how she does it. There's some kind of magic that starts in her dimples and spreads, he guesses. Magic seems as good an explanation for Irene Zuko as any.

He smiles back- not so magically- and sets himself down by her feet. "Hey, you," he echoes back.

"You're late," she says, without reproach. "I was starting to think you couldn't get away. I was gonna go back in the house in another minute."

"Good thing you didn't," Ray says. "I walked all the way out here through grossness for you." He points at his muddy feet. 

Irene laughs, making a face. "Oh, well, thanks for the sacrifice," she says, before she pulls a handkerchief- a real one, made of something organic and soft, like cotton or maybe silk- out of her pocket. She holds it out to him, indicating he should wipe off some of the mud.

"You sure you want me wrecking that?" Ray asks, giving it a dubious look. It's perfumed with lavender and monogrammed with her initials, for chrissakes. 

Irene shrugs. "I got a hundred of 'em," she says. "I'm not gonna miss this one." She presses it into his hand. "C'mon, clean up. My mother'll kill me if I let you come in with your feet like that."

Ray takes it and starts wiping with a grimace. Maybe he can wash it when he gets home, save it from total ruination. "I thought you weren't supposed to have me inside anymore," he says.

Irene snorts. "I thought you weren't supposed to come into Victor's Village anymore," she says.

Ray shrugs. "Yeah," he allows. "Worst that can happen to me is a beating, though. Worst that can happen to you..."

"Is having to put up with Frankie," she says, with a roll of her eyes like her brother's explosive temper isn't any worse than a mosquito bite. Annoying and unpleasant, sure, but nothing to write home about.

"Oh, well," Ray says, "I guess the worst has already happened to you, then."

Irene rolls her eyes again. She's not a fan of his cracks against her brother, but they're not any worse to her than a mosquito bite, either. Just something that happens, in this world she has to live in. "How's your ma doing?" she asks, in a blatant bid to change the subject. 

Ray shrugs again. "Doing," he says. "Worried, freaking out, the whole nine yards. She's foreign, ya know? She doesn't really get the Hunger Games."

Irene gives him a look. "Like anyone really _gets_ the Hunger Games?"

"Frankie did," Ray says. 

"Frankie gets a lot of things no one wants." Irene looks less than best pleased that he's managed to drag the topic back to Frankie. She tears a peapod in half with way too much enthusiasm and changes the subject again. "Did you hear about what happened in Four?"

Ray gives her a look. "And just where," he asks, "would I have heard about what happened in Four? You're the only person I know who's got a TV or a radio."

Irene seems to take the question in the spirit of genuine inquiry. "I thought maybe your dad might've heard something about it in the Hob--"

Ray cuts her off with a scowl. He likes discussing Pop less than she likes discussing Frankie. "Forget about it. Just tell me."

Irene glances around for any extra ears- why, Ray doesn't know, when presumably she heard it on the news and it's free info for everyone- before she leans in to whisper like a co-conspirator in a crime. "Their Tribute school burned down," she says. "Took all the Careers with it. They haven't got anybody to send but their poor kids."

Ray is aware that if his mother overheard him saying this, she'd box his ears and tell him it's a shameful way to act in the face of someone else's misfortune. It gives him pause for a moment. But only a moment. "Hey," he says, "that's fantastic. Are you sure?"

Irene looks at him as if he's grown another head. "Am I sure? Of course I'm sure! Why would you even ask that? Why would you even _say_ that? Jesus, Ray!"

"You even have to ask why I'd say that?" He asks, raising his eyebrows at her. "They mop the floor with us every year One and Two don't. Maybe with them out of the running, we got a chance for once."

Irene glares. "It's not as though we've never won," she reminds him. As if her pretty house and pretty dress aren't reminder enough. 

"Twice," Ray says. "Ever. In eighty years." He thinks, but doesn't say, _And one of those was Frankie, so it doesn't really count._

Irene seems to know he thought it anyway. She looks sour. "It's very hard to win the Games."

"It's harder when they drop in six fully-trained psycho killers who've never been hungry a day in their lives," Ray says.

"The Tribute Schools aren't just the big killers, you know," Irene says. "They send the kids there when they're as young as seven, so they have a whole five years before their names are in. In case something goes wrong and they don't have older kids for the Reaping."

"How do you know that?" Ray asks. Life in the other districts is mostly meant to be a known unknown; you were aware they existed, but anything more than that was too much, in the Capitol's opinion. 

"Frankie told me," Irene says. "He heard it from the girl who won in Four the year after him." Irene gets a look of concentration, like she's trying to remember the girl's name.

"The Ice Queen," Ray supplies. It may not be her real name, but it was what the press called her throughout all the build-up to the Games, then during her entire time in the arena, and of course throughout the Victory Tour after. If she even has a real name, that girl from Four has probably forgotten it herself from lack of use.

"Right," Irene says. "Her."

"He's friendly with her?" Ray makes a face. He hadn't thought even Frankie would stoop so low.

"All the victors are friendly with each other," Irene says. 

Ray shakes his head. "That's weird."

"No, it isn't," she says. "Who else do they have?"

"You mean besides the adoring millions of the Capitol?" Ray quirks his eyebrows at her, like she asked a trick question. Usually Irene thinks it's funny. She doesn't think it's funny now.

"Don't you think it's lonely to have survived something so awful?" she asks.

"I don't think it's lonely to have killed a bunch of people," he says. "Or to get so rich off doing it that you never have to work again."

Irene doesn't reply. 

Ray feels a brief twinge of guilt. Pigs will fly before he has much sympathy for Frankie and the others like him, but he knows it tortures Irene to live the high life because her brother murdered a bunch of twelve-year-olds. Her way of dealing with it seems to be imagining that Frankie and all the other victors are suffering deep emotional agonies from what they've done. Ray doesn't buy it for a second, but it feels jerkish to try and take that away from her.

"Don't let's talk about the Hunger Games," he says. "What are you thinkin' about? Tell me 'bout the world of Irene." He gestures dramatically as he says it, pitching his voice so he sounds like the announcer on one of the TV shows he sees Irene's ma watching every time they let him in the house. 

Irene smiles, weak and watery, like she'll cry. "'Fraid I can't just stop thinking about the Hunger Games, Ray. I'm going to be giving a stack of interviews a mile high with Mom and Dad and Frankie for the next two weeks. Once it's all started." She combs her fingers through her short, black hair, and her hands are trembling as she does it. "And I can't help it- I'm scared of the Reaping."

Absolutely anything else would be preferable to him than talking about this. Money, or lack thereof. Where Ma hides the honey so they don't get into it, since she saves it for colds and sore throats. Capitol politics. Frankie's dirty socks. Anything but this.

Ray puts on a brave joking face. "What, you? Pfft. What do you got to be scared of? You worried about a little needle stick for the check-in?"

Irene looks utterly serious. "The same things everybody has to be scared of."

He rolls his eyes. "Your name ain't in there but three times. Maybe four if you got tessera the year Frankie went."

"It only takes one," she says. "Anyway, how many do you got? Hm?"

Ray shrugs. "One or two," he says lightly. He has sixteen. It'd be more if he and Maria didn't split it between them, him taking the supplement for Ma, himself, and their brother, while Maria gets it for Pop, herself, and Frannie. 

"Right," Irene laughs. "One or two."

She still looks miserable, so Ray scoots closer to her on the porch and wraps his arm around her shoulders. "It's gonna be okay," he says, even though he has really no freaking idea if it is or not. He wishes she hadn't brought it up. He hates being worried about something he can't do anything about.

Irene lays her head up against his neck and sets her bowl of peas aside so she can wrap her arms around his waist. "Do you ever think about just getting out of here?" She asks this so quietly, Ray isn't sure he heard right.

"What, you and me?" he asks.

"Yeah," she says. "You and me. Out in the woods, away from all this. Just being on our own. No worries. No problems. No Hunger Games."

"Gotta admit, it sounds great," he lies. By no stretch of the imagination does it actually sound great. Being with Irene out from under the Capitol's thumb, sure. But out in the woods? There are wild dogs out there, and mountain lions, and poisonous snakes. And bugs, and dirt, and unfiltered water, and a ton of other things that would kill you much slower than the obvious scary things. Not to mention the lack of any practical skills on either of their parts to put clothes on their backs, roofs over their heads, or food in their bellies. 

No, as much as he hates District Twelve, he isn’t feeling too lovey-dovey about anywhere else, either. This was as good as it got.

Irene is still talking. "Maybe we could find somewhere else," she says. "Like where your ma came from."

Ray can't contain a snort. "There's nothing where my ma came from," he says. "The whole country was dying of plague, they put the healthy people on boats, and sent 'em out to wherever they could make landfall. By the time her boat got here, she was sick and everybody else was dead. You think she woulda stayed and raised kids here if she woulda had anywhere else to go?"

Irene sighs a little, like he's needlessly ruining a beautiful dream with facts. "I guess," she says. "Somewhere else, then. There must be something somewhere."

"You ever seen anywhere else on a map?" he asks.

"No," Irene admits.

Ray gives her shoulders a squeeze. 

She raises her head and looks at him, somewhere between hopeful and teasing. "But I've never seen where your ma came from on a map, either."

Ray laughs. "Okay, fine," he says. "I guess I kinda walked into that one."

"I guess you kinda did," she says with a smile.

Ray strokes some of her hair away from her face. He thinks, sometimes, that he'd be willing to go off on one of these crazy flights of fancy she has for the sake of that smile. 

For a little while, anyway. Until they got hungry.

He filches a pea from her bowl and pops it into his mouth. "What's for dinner tonight, besides peas?"

"You don't even want to know," Irene says. "It'll just break your heart when you have to go home."

It's breaking Ray's heart already. "Torture me," he groans. 

"Chicken pot pie," Irene says. "With real chicken."

"Actual real chicken?" he asks. "Not the stuff they say is real and local, like that's even possible?"

"I watched my mom kill it herself," Irene says.

"Maybe it's a very convincing robot," Ray teases.

"If it is, I guess I won't have to save you a piece," she sasses right back.

He laughs. "Okay, maybe you got a point."

Her smile is back again. 

"What else you havin'?" he asks. "It's never just the one thing, you always got four."

"They're called sides," Irene says, sticking her tongue out at him.

"Who cares what they're called?" Ray asks. "Just tell me what they're gonna be."

She tells him. The names themselves sound delicious. Potatoes. Asparagus. Blueberry scones for dessert- Ray isn't sure what a scone is, but he's positive that he wants to try one. Irene's mother is a fantastic cook, and what she can't do herself, she gets someone in the district to do for them. (The mysterious scones were commissioned from the bakery.) 

Ray doesn't usually spend too much time envying what Irene has that he doesn't- if he started, he might never be able to stop; just the thought of his own bedroom not shared with three younger siblings was enough to make him miserable for days- but Irene's access to delicious and plentiful food is the indulgence in this arena that he allows himself. He's grown up on his mother's gardening and her thousand attempts to make tessera grain and oil taste like something else. She used to tell him stories of the food they used to eat in her country, after the floods and before the plague, and the names of those always struck him like poetry. Fettucine. Polenta. Lasagna. Tiramisu. He devoted several hours as a child to imagining what each one must've been like, urging his ma to give him more details about the colors and textures and shapes. None of it is truly possible to recreate in District Twelve. 

His father finally put his foot down on the food stories when he was eight. _Would you shut up about what you used to eat? Fuck's sake, you'd be dead if you were back there. Don't go giving the kids dumb ideas about how magic it used to be._ It wasn't the first thing Ray had ever hated his father for, but it ranks near the top of the list. If it's not okay for them to dream about food, what the hell can they even dream about?

(He knows, without having to ask, what Pop's answer would be. Dreaming's for saps and your pretty little Victor's Village girlfriend. What do you need dreaming for?)

Ray leans over to the side to rest his head in Irene's lap. She glances over her shoulder carefully- always so damn carefully- to make sure no one's watching before she starts petting his hair.

"You know something?" Ray asks. "It might be worth it to get nabbed in the Reaping for a chance to eat like you do all the time."

Irene looks guilty and sad at the same time. Guilty's familiar- Irene's always guilty about her embarrassment of riches- but the sad is newer, and to Ray's sorrow, happening more and more all the time. He doesn't know what she has to be so sad about. He wishes she wouldn't. 

"What?" he asks, reaching up to stroke her cheek, near those pale blue eyes that seem like they could look right through him. 

"Nothing," she says, scratching the back of his hand with either a fondness for him or a distaste for the dried mud lingering near his fingers. She's chipping it off, flake by flake, with an attention to detail that reminds him of his mother scrubbing Frannie's back. It gives him the creeps, so he pulls his hand away.

"Come on," he says. "It's not nothing. What?"

Irene looks at him silently for a while, like she's weighing and measuring him for worthiness to trust with her opinion. Evidently, he measures up, because she decides to grace him with a little dollop of the shame she carries around.

"No, Ray," she says. "Nothing is worth that."

He doesn't know what to say. 

But what he thinks is, _Only someone who's never had to struggle for food thinks that principles are worth more._

That'll lead to a fight, he's sure of it. And oh, he doesn't want to do that. Doesn't want to poke Irene in the places her feelings are vulnerable, just to feel vindicated that she maybe gets it. He doesn't need her to get it. Doesn't even really _want_ her to get it, truth be told. Irene's principled goodness and her ignorance of the rest of District Twelve's struggles are some of the things he loves best about her. He wants to let her keep thinking that the world's not so bad as it really is. She suffers enough from what she already knows. He doesn't want her carrying him, too.

"Yeah, sure," he says. "You're right."

She leans over him to kiss him and the taste of her lips reminds him, _Oh, hey, yeah. This is what dreaming is for._


	3. Chapter 3

For the second time this week, Victoria finds herself wishing she was anywhere but here. The circumstances are about as opposite as you could ever hope for, but she's still consumed with the primal desire to run.

The day before the Reaping dawns bright and beautiful, with skies so blue they look fake. A warm breeze plays through her hair, tossing it back behind her shoulders so that she can actually feel the sun on her neck for once, and the landscape is dotted with little shoots of green where a few blades of grass have poked their heads out through the snow. Here in Four, they call this Trickery Spring; an annual joke that Nature likes to play on their residents. It gets just warm enough and green enough for a few days that you think maybe, just maybe, the long winter they've all lived in since well before Victoria was born will come to an end. Kids get hopeful; adults get annoyed; really old people- of which there are very few- tend to kind of laugh it off, so used to being conned by their very own land that it's just downright funny now. 

This year, it feels to Victoria like just another way the world is trying to rub in that good things can't last forever. She supposes that Greta Garbo probably feels the same way.

They stand on a platform in the district Loop, the wide circle in the very heart of District Four, surrounded by the concentric rings of each level of civilization. They're miles inward from the Outer Ring, walled in by the Merchant's Circle. Here in the Loop are the Capitol stations and administrative buildings. The mayor's office. City Hall. The Peacekeepers' station, and the tiny little jail where Greta was carted after she was conclusively determined to be guilty.

They're here to dispense, in the mayor's words, honor and justice.

"Victoria Metcalf," the mayor says, facing her on the platform while a rabbity-looking assistant stands next to him holding an ornate wooden box, "for your service to the district, on the night of the fire, our esteemed colleagues in the Capitol would like to present you with this token of our appreciation."

Victoria nods her head and keeps her face impassive. She's seen her share of these, and understands that looking happy- whether she is or not- is unforgivable in these circumstances. Humility would be preferable, but she's not very good at faking that kind of thing. She _could_ care less about the mayor condescending to talk to her, but it would be very, very hard. Impassive seems as safe a mask as any; impassive creates speculation that she's got deep inner turmoil going from what happened that night, and is smothering it under the bravery she's assumed to have. That strikes her as a rumor she can live with.

The mayor opens the box in the rabbity assistant's hands, and takes out of it a fairly small but impressive-looking medal. Victoria's not sure, but she thinks it's made of polished copper. The design makes her think of a penny that's been melted and imprinted as fast as they could. The elaborate design of it- all twelve districts' symbolic birds, nesting in a ring of laurels, with the flag of Panem in the center- looks made to cover up any details that might peek through and reveal its true origin. This is confirmed in her mind when she sees that they've engraved both sides.

He drapes the medal around her neck, fumbling to avoid catching its clasp in her hair. She didn't do anything to tame it for these proceedings- doesn't own anything to tame it _with,_ even if she'd had the inclination- and the mayor looks frustrated by the obstacle of her unruly curls. Her mask nearly slips into an all-too-inappropriate laugh.

The thing bangs against her chest once he's got it on her properly, and Victoria feels the weight like an admonition. _Behave._

The mayor steps away from her and Victoria hears, rather than sees, the meager, scattered applause of the residents of District Four. No one particularly feels like celebrating anything, least of all the orphan girl who steals their garbage and just happened to put those skills to use one time jury-rigging a ladder. No one's come to see her. She's just one part of the warm-up act to get the crowd ready for the real show.

The mayor turns to the next part, and regards him much more solemnly than he had her.

"Benton Fraser," the mayor says.

The tall, broad-shouldered boy- around Victoria's age, she thinks, though the hollow blankness of his face makes it very hard to tell- bows his head as if with deep respect, and the mayor momentarily seems overcome.

It's hard to blame him. On the list of her inappropriate thoughts for the occasion, how handsome that boy is swims near the top. His eyes are as blue as this artificial-looking sky, his jaw set square and proud, his wavy brown hair cut short and combed within an inch of its life to look some semblance of dignified. The real clue to his age is in his hands, clasped behind his back military-style, where she can see his knuckles going white from how tightly they're held together. She suspects him of a desire to nervously fidget, like he feels awkward and as on display as she does. Like he would also rather be anywhere but here.

"Benton Fraser," the mayor repeats, trying to regain the thread of his thoughts. His voice has become more gentle. "For your father's service, and sacrifice, we would like to present you with this token of our esteem and appreciation. Please take it with our sincere condolences."

His appreciation, Victoria can't help but notice, is more sincere for the Peacekeeper's son than for her. She supposes that's what comes of being the child of someone in the civil service. Or possibly for looking more respectful to the mayor. She's sure it's either the idea or the presentation, anyway. She has trouble imagining that a Peacekeeper- _any_ Peacekeeper- was well-loved.

Fraser doesn't look especially moved by the condolences, anyway. He accepts the words and the medal with a polite nod of his head and a murmur of "thank you" that is so soft Victoria has to strain to hear. He catches her in the act of eavesdropping, and fixes her with a look.

Victoria raises her eyebrows at him, wondering if she's supposed to feel scolded.

No. She doesn't think so. The look is surprisingly open, even appreciative, as if he thinks that she was concerned. She feels a brief stab of something like guilt because she wasn't. She smooths her face back to its impassive lines and looks away.

It continues in this vein for a long time. All of the families who lost children in the fire- far, far too many for Victoria to count- are lined up at the side of the platform, invited up one by one to be presented with similar gifts. The first handful get medals; the next, purely decorative swords. It gets poorer and more random after that. Some families are given knitted blankets of the Capitol's flag; others are given quilt squares. Some get nothing at all but the promise of their child's tessera for the year, without the usual condition of an additional entry in the Reaping. Bereaved siblings are given toys, and promises of a year's free tuition at the Tribute school when they manage to rebuild it. Transferable to their own children, if it takes that long.

Victoria gets the sense that they're being given whatever wasn't nailed down. Absolutely anything that could be re-purposed as a token of mourning from the district and the Capitol has been turned into a way for the people in charge to say, _We're sorry for your loss,_ whether the gift even makes any sense at all. It'd be tacky, she thinks, if it weren't for the fact that she also gets the sense that this display of public grief is actually genuine. They _are_ sorry for the losses. Children dying, especially the children from the Tribute school, isn't unusual in District Four by any stretch, but losing so many at once- from something other than plague or starvation- is still an anomaly that no one knows how to cope with.

A numb part of Victoria that's been there since the night of the fire, and her terrible realization of what it means for the rest of them, wonders if they're all feeling the same way she is. Doomed. Cheated. Like the system that has kept them all from worrying about their own skins has just dramatically failed them. Everyone in Four has sacrificed to keep that school afloat. More than half of the wealth they win every time they win the Games is channeled right back into the school, focusing on keeping their champions top of the line: the best fed, the best groomed, the best trained. They've sent their loved ones out to die every year all but entirely for the purpose of being able to continue sending their loved ones out to die every year.

And yet, this system has protected their youngest and weakest. Never in Victoria's lifetime has a skinny, malnourished twelve-year-old with no skills but the ability to hide been sent into the Arena from Four, like they are from most of the others. Everyone who has ever given a child to the Arena sent a child who has been given their best chance, who was seventeen or eighteen and had a chance to live at least a little, who has Goddamn _volunteered_ for the privilege. This has been the only way they could take some element of control of what the Capitol does to them. They bought into it, made peace with it, made it their own. And now that disaster has struck and they cannot do it, their youngest and weakest will be the ones to suffer.

It isn't fair. And Victoria is scared to death that it's going to be her.

At the back of the crowd, facing towards the Great Wall and what's left of the once-great school, a line of seven Peacekeepers are poised with a set of old-fashioned rifles, of the sort Victoria didn't even know still existed, since the Peacekeepers usually carry the shiny new plasma guns that are made in District Three. The age of the guns seems to emphasize just how far back they've been thrown by this, even though she's aware that it's probably just for show. Almost an entire generation is lost to them, and the rest of it is going to be picked off in the coming years. She wonders if they'll even have enough kids of the right age for the Games in two or three more years. She wonders, in that new numb part of her mind, what they'll do to cope with _that._

Frobisher is standing with the rifle-toting Peacekeepers, looking bereft and determined. His face seems to have aged dramatically since the night of the fire, as if all of his years have doubled down on him at once. There's a slight droop to his shoulders, and a hardness to the lines around his mouth that Victoria can see even all the way over here. He is... diminished, she thinks, is the word. Like he's already begun to shrink in on himself.

He yells a few commands Victoria can't make out, and the other Peacekeepers go through a change of pose on each shout. (Hysterically, Victoria wants to laugh; they've _choreographed_ this damn thing like a dance.)

Frobisher has one of the decorative swords that the mayor handed out to some of the grieving families, and he holds it level with his eyes, the blade's shadow carving a path down the center of his face. He is waiting for some signal, she thinks. She doesn't know what.

But then the bells of the district begin to toll, loud and clanging, like ringing the curfew, and Victoria wonders what else she thought it could be.

After the first shattering clang, Frobisher brings the sword down to the ground and lets out a shout. The Peacekeepers in the line respond with a shot.

The combination of sounds is so loud, Victoria is dizzy, and it takes all of her self-control not to fall on the floor of the platform, her hands crushing down as hard as possible over her ears. She permits herself the weakness of bracing herself with a hand on a wall. (Safe enough, she thinks. No one is looking at her. All eyes are pointed at the Peacekeepers.)

The noise clears exactly long enough for the bell to toll again, the same single clang that is loud enough the sound reverberates in her chest, like it's been built on top of her heart, and the shots ring out again. This time, she does nearly stumble, and she's only just caught before she falls by another pair of hands that protectively position themselves over her ears.

When she looks, she sees they're the hands of the Peacekeeper's boy.

She tries to ask him why he's helping her, or how he's standing up, but he shakes his head when she opens her mouth, and she snaps her jaws shut again.

The boy Fraser keeps his hands over her ears and his eyes on the Peacekeepers when the third bell toll rings out, followed immediately by the third shot. Even covered, Victoria's ears are still ringing, and she can't help staring at him. His face is so carefully blank, as though at his own father's funeral, he isn't feeling anything at all. Or else he's better than she'd have ever thought someone could be at keeping everything buried.

Victoria is jealous. She's sure her own poker face isn't that good.

Three shots, it seems, are all one fallen Peacekeeper and an entire school full of children is worth, and the bells are ringing now as fast and almost as dementedly merry as they rang the last time the President had a grandchild. But they're quieter now, and so Fraser takes his hands away from her ears.

"Thanks," Victoria says, unsure he hears her until he nods his head.

"Of course," he says, pitching his volume up a notch to be heard. "You're welcome." He goes back to his place on the platform and clasps his hands behind his back again, as if he had never moved from the spot at all.

Victoria follows his lead and resumes her former place and posture. By the time her hearing has returned more or less to normal, the rest of the crowd finally remembers that the platform exists.

Now, she thinks, _now_ is when they _really_ came for.

Off to the side of the crowd, opposite the Peacekeepers who fired the tribute shots, a door opens on the tiny, little-used jail that serves in District Four. A second later, a pair of Peacekeepers shackled to Greta Garbo step out.

If Greta usually looks a bit crazy, a few days in jail haven't helped. She looks unhinged. Her face is still smeared with the smoke and soot of the fire she started, her clothes the same ones she was wearing when she was arrested, gone filthy and ragged like she's been rolling on the floor of her cell in mad fits. Her hair is as wild and tangled as Victoria's own, flapping across her face in the breeze while she keeps giving them all a terrifying, skeletal grin.

Unconsciously, Victoria wraps her arms around herself, as if to ward off a chill. Fraser's hand reaches over to lightly tug them down. She can't allow herself to quail in the face of this. Appearances in District Four are everything.

The crowd who's gathered to watch all this faces no such compunctions. As Greta is walked down the row that parts in the crowd, a single person dares to lean forward and spit in her face. It acts like the breaking of a dam, and a flood of shouting and cursing naturally follows.

"You bitch!"

"Maniac!"

"Murderer!"

"My babies!" One woman screams. "You killed my babies!"

One person in the crowd hurls a handful of what Victoria hopes is mud in Greta's direction, the ooze splattering across her face. Greta, for her part, looks delighted at this- as if she's been waiting all her life to be noticed, to have the entire district paying attention to her. It doesn't seem to matter to her that she's become the most hated person in District Four.

She makes the walk all the way to the platform, smiling and laughing at every screamed insult and every piece of muck and garbage thrown her way. She doesn't even mind the noose that's wrapped around her neck.

The mayor's rabbity-looking assistant is the one to take the floor this time. Victoria guesses the mayor himself doesn't have the stomach for it. 

The assistant unfurls a scroll that the mayor hands him, and reads in a nasty, officious sort of voice. "Greta Garbo," he says, "you have been investigated, tried, and found guilty of crimes against humanity, the Capitol, and the people of your district."

The people of her district let out a united jeer of curses, hisses, and unintelligible wails. Some, Victoria notices with a faint dizzy feeling, brandish pictures of their children.

"For the crime of arson in the first degree," the assistant reads, "you have been found guilty."

"Witch!" One of the women with pictures screams, and Victoria realizes from the bandages on her hands, this is the woman who tried to dig her way through the wall the night of the fire. She wonders, distantly, if she was right in her guess, and the girl in the picture really was the woman's only child.

"For the crime of murder in the first degree," the assistant continues, "you have been found guilty."

"How could you?" A man near Victoria's feet shouts. " _How could you?!_ "

"For the crime of demonstration against the Capitol," the assistant says, pronouncing this as if it were the most dire of them all, "and violation of the Treaty of the Treason, you have been found guilty. Have you anything to say for yourself?"

Greta's only response is to giggle, in such a childish way well under her years that Victoria feels sick. "No more Careers," she says. " _No more._ " She howls in the direction of the crowd, like an animal, looking so pleased with herself that the better part of District Four looks like they want to throw up.

The assistant's lip curls in disgust before he continues. "For these crimes, you have been convicted and sentenced to hang by the neck until dead. May God have mercy on your soul."

The cheering that greets this pronouncement is nearly louder than the funeral bells.

Victoria tries to find a place to look so that she doesn't have to watch the part that comes next, but her eyes seem less devoted to the survival of her sanity than her mind. Even staring as fixedly as she can at the Panem flag flying over the post office, she can't help looking out the corner of her eye as Greta's unchained from the two Peacekeepers who escorted her, and led to stand on the trap door that was put in especially for this occasion. The two sights try to converge and give her a splitting headache: the flag flapping in the breeze, the burlap sack pulled over Greta's head, the abstract geometric gold eagle, the Peacekeeper in the corner who pulls a long wooden lever. 

Victoria isn't certain when it happens if the sound she hears is the bright red banner snapping against the wind or the crack of Greta's neck. All she can really process is the cheers.

There doesn't seem to be any kind of official ending to the ceremony. She stands dumbly, waiting to be dismissed with some tolling of the bell, or final parting words, but none seem to be coming. Eventually, she folds her arms across her waist and starts to shuffle off the stage.

She only makes it halfway across the square before she's stopped by the mayor's assistant, giving her an oily smile. 

"Miss Metcalf," he says, in a tone he seems to think is pleasant, "may I borrow you for a moment?"

\---

The tiny bistro in the Merchant's Circle, nestled between the bakery and the sweet shop, is probably the least visited outlet in the entire district. The food is- by the smell, anyway- fantastic, but the prices are so high that only the political officials and nearest neighbors can afford to eat there. The recipe stocks are kept low for this reason, so that absolutely nothing goes to waste. Victoria's never even eaten out of their garbage.

The mayor's assistant looks comfortable anyway. For all that the staff doesn't seem to recognize him as a regular customer.

He guides Victoria to a window seat that the server clearly doesn't want to give them, and pulls out her chair for her like she's some kind of royalty. It makes her nervous. 

He sits across from her and orders without even glancing at his menu. "I think we should both like to start with a lobster bisque," he says, in that false pleasant voice. "Then move on to your snow crab."

The server shoots a skeptical look in Victoria's direction, rightly guessing that she's never eaten either of those things before in her life and can't speak to any particular liking for them. He writes it down anyway, and speeds off to the kitchen. Victoria has a feeling that their food will fly out of that kitchen, well ahead of other people who ordered first, just to get her out of their window.

The assistant spreads a linen napkin across his lap and gives her a smile. She thinks it's supposed to be a smile, anyway. It's hard to tell. She's never seen a face so ill-suited to smiling before in her entire life. 

"I hope you don't mind my ordering for you," he says, unfolding her napkin for her and scooting it to her across the table. "But you do look like you're in need of a good meal, and equally like you wouldn't know one if it bit you."

Victoria takes the napkin and spreads it in her lap, trying not to look too suspicious. Since when has anyone in District Four ever cared about if- let alone _what_ \- she eats?

"Thank you," she says, anyway, and she winces internally at how it comes out sounding like she meant, _Go fuck yourself._

He doesn't seem to take any offense. Instead, he takes a satchel from his shoulder and begins sorting through it for papers. "I would like to thank you again for your service to the district," he says, "and by extension, the Capitol. Awfully quick thinking, using that net as a ladder."

"Uh-huh," Victoria says, trying to get a look at his papers. Every second she spends with him makes her more feel uneasy, and less like being polite and making pleasant chatter.

"May I ask," he says, "how you thought of that?"

As she predicted, the server returns with their food in record time, balancing on one hand a tray with two bowls of a creamy yellow soup, topped with artfully-arranged lobster chunks and bright green herbs. He's hardly even set it down on the table before hunger gets the better of her and Victoria starts gulping it down at a speed that makes the other diners look shocked.

"I've done it before," she rasps, her tongue and throat raw from not waiting for the soup to cool. "Years ago."

"Ah," the assistant says, as if he thought as much. He settles his bowl neatly on his place mat and starts organizing the silverware with a compulsive determination that gives Victoria the sense he has never, ever gone hungry. It instantly makes her dislike him.

"It doesn't really matter," she says. "We're all fucked anyway."

"What kind of language is that for a young lady?" he asks lightly, picking up a spoon and taking a single, delicate sip of his soup.

Victoria snorts instead of dignifying that question with a reply. She gulps down the rest of her soup- lobster chunks and all- and finally picks up her spoon to start scraping the creamy residue on the bowl.

The assistant looks as if he's barely containing revulsion. "Don't scratch up their china, Miss Metcalf," he says. "If you're still hungry, I'm sure there's more in the kitchen."

"What are you, my mother?" she asks. All the same, she suspects he's right about the spoon. It's not scraping up as well as she'd like, and they might try to make her pay for the bowl if she scratches it. She abandons it to rub the inside with her finger and lick the remnants off.

His lip curls for a moment, but then his oily, unpleasant imitation of a smile is back again. "Oh, I haven't introduced myself, have I?" he asks. "Forgive me."

Victoria shrugs and makes a noncommittal noise.

"I," he says, with a dramatic little pause, "am Vice Consul Francis Bolt. The President's brother."

A finger of bisque goes down the wrong pipe and Victoria covers her mouth to muffle coughs. 

Bolt's eyes light up, as if he's taking great pleasure in her reaction. "Yes," he says. "Precisely."

Frantically, Victoria tries to replay their entire conversation in her head, trying to measure how rude she has been to this man who can kill her with a penstroke. What has she said? Is it still possible to recover?

"I didn't--" she begins to say, but he cuts her off with a wave of his hand.

"Didn't know me?" he asks. "Or perhaps didn't know that the President had a brother?" He gives her the nasty pseudo-smile again. "Don't worry, Miss Metcalf. You can say it. I've heard it all. People often have a tendency not to notice me. My brother takes up so much room."

Victoria wants to say that even if he had appeared on television a thousand times, she wouldn't know him, as she doesn't have one. She opts not to. It seems safer not to speak.

"Fortunately for me," Bolt continues, "not being noticed has been a distinct advantage for me in pursuing my true life's calling."

He's silent for so long after this statement that Victoria understands that he's waiting for her to ask. "What is your true calling?"

The look he gives her borders on a leer. Victoria has the unsettling feeling that he specifically wants a young girl asking him questions and paying attention to him. He's like poor mad Greta Garbo- so overlooked that he doesn't care how he gets your attention, as long as he's got it.

He steeples his short, hairy fingers together, and leans near her, like a conspirator. "I solve problems," he says.

"Problems?" she asks, glancing out the corner of her eye for where the nearest exit is.

"Yes," he says. "Problems. My brother, God love him, is not the greatest of thinkers. He's personable, charismatic, in his way. A great executor of the grand gesture. But the nitty-gritty, so to speak...problems. These are my explicit domain." He takes another sip of bisque. "Problems, for instance, like the one I am pondering right now."

"What would that be?" she asks, scooting back in her chair as much as she can to try and put some space between them.

He lets out an amused chuckle. "Your district has a problem, Miss Metcalf. A rather dire one. One that I expect you've worked out."

Victoria can think of several problems in her district that no one at the Capitol has ever taken much notice of. She gets the feeling that if she were to start naming them, she wouldn't survive long past this lunch.

He doesn't wait for her to start guessing this time. "I am referring, of course, to your recent tragedy, and its resultant demographic conundrum. The Reaping is tomorrow, and you haven't got enough entries."

Is this a real problem? Victoria wonders. It's never occurred to her that there might be a quota for the Reaping. Surely as long as they have one person of each gender over the age of twelve, they've got enough for the Hunger Games.

He lets out another amused little chuckle. "I see you haven't worked it out, then. Allow me to enlighten you." He stirs his soup with his spoon, as though he's arranging the herbs into some specific pattern or other. Victoria stares at it, half-expecting he's going to draw her a diagram in its surface. He doesn't.

"In your district," he says, "you are the only girl of appropriate age to be sent that's left."

Victoria balks so hard her chair squeaks backwards on the floor. "That's not true," she says. "There's plenty of--"

"Plenty of younger children, twelve to fourteen or so," he finishes. "Of course I've counted them. But you see, back in the Capitol, many of the Games' devotees are surprisingly tender-hearted. They are weeping for your district and its tragedy. Mourning the loss of so many promising youngsters in a way that belies any sense of irony in them."

Irony, Victoria thinks. Is that the word for being sad over an accident that has killed far fewer children than the Hunger Games itself has killed in the aggregate?

"They are worrying," he continues, "worrying that such a young child having to go into the Games after such a trauma as the loss of most of his peers is... unfair."

She can't help herself. "Of course it's unfair," she says. "The whole thing's unfair. Isn't that the point?" Immediately she claps her hands over her mouth, as if to put a lid on it before she says anything worse.

Bolt laughs. "Yes, of course you're right. All the same, allowing someone young and untrained to represent your district in its time of need may strike the people of the Capitol as callous on the part of their administration. It has the potential to make this year's Games very... unpopular." He gives her a look that she thinks is meant to elicit sympathy. She hopes he doesn't expect to actually get any. "Now, Miss Metcalf, I think you'll agree, no one _likes_ being unpopular. From what I understand, you yourself are somewhat unpopular in your district. It isn't pleasant, is it?"

Victoria clenches her teeth to keep from saying something stupid, and grinds out, "No, I guess not."

"You see?" he says, with another laugh that sends chills down her spine and into her legs so that she has to fight the urge to run. "It is particularly bad for a government to be unpopular. We have been unpopular in the past, and that is why there are such things as the Hunger Games now. Another such dip into unpopularity, and I hate to think of what we will have to do to correct it."

Victoria feels numb and foreboding, seeing already what's coming and wanting more than anything to make time stop before it gets there. "So you can't let them draft a kid," she says. "What do you want me to do about it?"

Bolt regards her with a level look, edged with repressed glee, like he's just dying to be the bearer of bad news. "I want you," he says, "to volunteer."

The waiter chooses then to take her bowl and lay a plate of snow crab in front of her. Victoria shoves it away. 

"No," she says, shaking her head.

"Oh, come now," he says. "Think of what it would mean to your district- to your country's national spirit. The recently-awarded hero of the terrible fire standing up to take the place of an innocent little girl. Your mentor will hardly have to lift a finger. They'll be flinging sponsorships at you." He looks at her with a fiery determination, like he's been swept up in his own daydream of what it could be. "Have some patriotism, damn it. Your country's more important than your childish discomfort."

Victoria leans her elbows on the table and runs her hands through her hair. She shakes her head no again, already knowing it won't make a difference. She is going to be out there. In the arena. Fighting and starving and running and hiding and killing all the way up until someone bigger and better-trained than her stabs her in the back. She doesn't even get the merciful half day everyone else gets of thinking it could be somebody else. She's going to have to go to the Reaping and know that no matter what name comes out of the big glass bowl, hers is going to be the one in all the Capitol’s headlines tomorrow night.

Her life is over before she's even dead.

"Come now," he says again. "You will have every chance. Your mentor will train you, once you've gotten to the Capitol. You truly won't hurt for sponsors. And you have something of a Career lineage, don't you?"

Victoria's stomach suddenly feels like it's become full of writhing, hissing live snakes. She swallows a lump that comes to her throat and sets her jaw against any other attempts her body might make at crying. "My sister," she says.

"Valeria."

"Valerie," she corrects. "Valeria was just... a thing her mentor thought she should be called. Since it's a Capitol name."

"You have a Capitol name," he reminds her.

"Yes," she says. The year she was born was the last year it was legal to pick names from the Capitol's celebrity rosters. Her parents had thought it would give her a slight leg up.

"Quite a fortuitous one for going into the Hunger Games, I might add," he says.

"I guess." Victoria's hard-pressed to feel that there's anything fortuitous about going into the Hunger Games.

"Your sister didn't win," he begins.

"No," Victoria says, and she doesn't care anymore that it's rude to cut him off. She'll be dead in a week. What difference does it make? "Boy from Twelve bashed her head in with a rock." And now the same thing will probably happen to her. 

"There was some unpleasantness with your parents after," he says.

"If you mean my mother went crazy and burned the house down with her, me and my father in it, then yes," she snaps. "There was some _unpleasantness._ "

"And you were the only survivor?" he asks.

"Why ask me questions if you already know the answer?" she says.

"I hate to point it out," he says, with absolutely no indication in his demeanor or expression that he feels any such thing, "but by my accounting, that means there isn't anyone to miss you."

Victoria bites the insides of her cheeks to keep from biting him.

"Besides being a great gesture for your district and your nation," he says, "it would be much _neater._ " He chuckles. "And maybe you'll win."

"What if I don't?" she asks.

"What, win?"

"No," she says. "Volunteer." She lifts her chin a little defiantly, at least as much as she dares. "What if I'm not... patriotic?"

Bolt's face goes as still as a stone. Victoria didn't think it was possible for him to have expressions more unpleasant than the mock-friendly ones he kept trying to make at her, but this one is worse. This one said, even if he did not, _I have the power to destroy you. And I intend to._

He composes himself very carefully for a moment, stroking his mustache and adjusting his glasses. He eats a spoonful of his bisque, and drums his fingernails on the table. Victoria worries that he's going to reach across the table and slap her.

Finally, he answers her with a chill, deadly calm. "I will be very disappointed."

Victoria swallows. "How has disappointing you worked out for other people?" She doesn't know why she asked. She can't think of a thing she wants to know less than the answer to that question.

Bolt looks amused again. "Historically?" he says. "Not well."

Victoria takes a deep breath and decides not to leave well enough alone. With a cocksure tone she doesn't feel, she asks, "Define 'not well.'"

Bolt gives her a beaming smile so subhuman she can't believe it's even possible for a person to make it. He reaches across the table and tucks a tangled lock of her hair behind her ear. "The odds would be appreciably more in your favor," he says, "in the arena."

Every part of Victoria seems to ache with such terror that she wants to cry. Her eyes are stinging, her chest is crushing in on itself. Her hands shake. Her jaw hurts. "Fine," she says, in a hollow voice she's having trouble recognizing as her own. "I'll do it."

Bolt gives her his first real smile all day, looking pleased with himself. Girl secured. Problem solved. He can go home now and tell everyone that the Games will proceed as usual, with nothing for them to worry about. "Good," he says. "Very good. Our nation needs more people like you, Miss Metcalf. Your sacrifices let us all go on."

Victoria sinks back in her chair, trying to rub some of the tension out of face. "If that helps you," she says.

Bolt takes the napkin from his lap and dabs delicately at his mouth. He gathers his satchel and his papers and stands to go. "Well, now," he says, "I shall take my leave of you. I have to go have a similar talk with a boy."

"I feel sorry for him," she deadpans.

Bolt tsks at her. "Don't go having that kind of attitude now. Cheer up. You're going to be a national hero."

"I can hardly wait."

Bolt chooses to ignore that remark. "I'll have a dress waiting for you at the Children's Home later this evening. You should wear it to the Reaping tomorrow. Look your best."

"Of course," she says.

He pushes his untouched crab and what remains of his soup to her across the table. "Try to eat all of that," he says. "You'll need your strength."

Victoria wonders if he needs her enough for her to get away with throwing them at him. 

He smiles at her again, and it's a smile she's seen a dozen times on the victors at the Hunger Games. The smile of someone who's won, in every way possible.

He picks up the medal hanging around her neck and strokes his thumb over the surface, as if to polish it. "This would make a lovely choice for your district token, wouldn't it?" He laughs before she can answer, and, whistling, walks away.


	4. Chapter 4

"Your tie is crooked," Frannie says, sounding so damn smug that if it was any day but the Reaping, Ray would pop her one on the shoulder.

As it is, Ray grits his teeth and begins unknotting his tie again. "Damn it," he says.

"Cuss word, cuss word!" Frannie cries, pointing at him and bouncing up and down like some kind of demented kangaroo rat. 

"Francesca," Ma sighs. "Leave Raimundo alone. Is a tough day for him. He no need more problems from you."

There was the understatement of the freaking year.

Frannie sticks her tongue out at him and rushes off to go bother another sibling. Probably Maria. She's been in the bathroom for an hour already, hogging their only mirror while she fixes her hair.

Ma takes his tie away from Ray and starts knotting it around his neck herself. "You remember where to go?" she asks, knotting the tie a little too tight in her attempts to keep her hands from shaking.

Ray wants to scoff at this maternal fretting- Ray's been to the Reaping four years in a row, not to mention the small fact that you'd have to be both blind and brain-damaged to not be able to find the town square; of course he knows where to go- but he stamps it down as best he can. Much like not thumping Frannie, Reaping Day means no sassing Ma. These last few hours before the names are drawn call for good behavior from everybody in his family old enough to know better.

The kids, at least. Pop doesn't seem to have got that memo. He's been in town placing bets on who'll get Reaped, if they'll cry, and what their odds will be in the arena since dawn.

"I wish you had better shoes," Ma says, casting a lamentable look in the direction of his feet. "Takes away the point of the suit, sending you out in ragged shoes."

"They're not so bad," Ray says, but they are and she's right. Ray can only hope that the cameras in the square to film the Reaping only shoot from the knees up.

Ma looks at him with the same foreboding look she gives him every year, like she's never going to see him again. Her eyes are misty- not quite swimming with tears, but threatening to go that way at any second. "In my country, we never do this," she says. "I wish..."

Ray shakes his head to cut her off. "It's gonna be fine, Ma. It always is. I've only got sixteen. There are people out there with way more than me."

Ma shakes her head. "Maria has just as many," she says. "And Nando has half. Three children, with too many chances." The threat of tears turns into actual tears, and Ray has to fight a wave of panic. If Ma ends up crying at the Reaping, she could get in trouble. They're all supposed to pretend this is some great honor they're all thrilled to participate in. No one's supposed to look sad.

"Come on, Ma, don't cry," Ray says. "It's going to be fine. Really. Look, you were the only one who made the trip, right? You were lucky. We're gonna be lucky, too."

This does not have the desired effect. His mother's tears are shortly accompanied by sobs.

Ray groans. "C'mon, Ma, quit crying, please? Frannie's gonna cry if she sees you crying, and she doesn't even get that this is serious. Don't make it turn scary for her." He can just imagine what will happen if they go to the Reaping with two crying people. Probably their whole family will get arrested for crimes against the Hunger Games or something. Fine time that would be, not getting picked in the Reaping, just to get arrested for crying.

Frannie's sake seems to work. Ma sniffs loudly and starts drying her eyes with her apron. "You right. I'm sorry." She sniffs again. "Just so much worry."

Awkwardly, Ray pats her shoulder. "Everything's gonna be okay. I'll find you right after, and we'll eat something nice." What, Ray doesn't know, when Ma's winter coat is currently in hock to pay for soap and brushes to spiff them all up for the occasion and what money they have has to buy that back, but maybe he can get some ingredients from Irene that her ma won't miss.

Ma nods, still sniffing, but she seems to have it mostly under control. "You are such a good boy, Raimundo."

"Thanks, Ma," he says. "I'm doing my best."

She nods again. "I love you."

Ray tries not to make a face. Emotional outpourings embarrass him when they're not outright illegal. "Yeah, Ma," he says. "You, too."

To his horror, she gives him a long, smacking kiss on his cheek.

"Ma," he whines.

She brushes it off, and turns to yell across the house. "Maria! Everyone waiting for you! When you coming out?"

"In a minute!" Maria yells back.

"You gonna make everybody late!" Ma shouts, shaking her head. "That girl."

"Don't worry about it," Ray says, mostly because he's hoping to avoid any more crying or kissing. "She's never made us late before."

"Be a bad time for her to start," Ma mutters.

"Heh, yeah." Ray rubs the back of his neck and tries to loosen his tie. "Look, Ma, I'm gonna go ahead now, okay? I'll see you guys there."

"Okay," Ma says, putting her hand on his cheek. She's got that look again, so Ray decides to get out while the getting is good.

Out in the lane, half the people in their section of the Seam are also dressed to impress and moving for the square. To Ray's annoyance, they're moving at the pace of a cattle drive.

"Geez," he mutters to himself, "you'd think they were _all_ going to the arena." He's half-tempted to start shoving past them all, since Ma's not here to see.

"Ray, wait!" Maria yells, running after him with her skirt flying above her knees in an unladylike way. Her hair has been combed, pinned and oiled to within an inch of its life.

Ray stops to wait for her with a glare. "Is that olive oil?"

"What's it to you?" she asks. "It's from my tessera."

"Both our tesserae is all our tesserae," he snaps. "You're wasting food."

"What difference does it make?" Maria says. "We're just gonna have to get it again, anyway."

Ray wants to smack her, but if Maria's out here, then Ma can't be too far behind. "Trade something for it next time," he says. "Let somebody else go hungry."

Maria rolls her eyes, but evidently decides to take that as close enough to a victory. She couldn't get that close on an argument over food any other day of the year.

When they finally arrive in the square, it's already in full swing for the Reaping. There's a dozen rows (one for boys and one for girls, two for each age of Reaping eligibility) of little work stations, manned by various volunteers taking blood samples and checking all the names against the census.

"See you," Ray says before he gets in the line for boy sixteens.

"Good luck," Maria says back. She heads for her own line, girl fourteens. He watches until she's disappeared in the crowd, and he can't see her anymore.

His line is a model of efficiency. He's at the front, getting his finger stuck, in no time at all. 

The holograph pops up from the needle machine, flashing in blue light _Vecchio, Raymond_ with his birthday underneath.

The lady at the work station consults a sheaf of paper, draws a line through his name, and waves him on.

Although the check-ins aren't quite finished, the mayor is already at the podium onstage, narrating the history of Panem and the Hunger Games for the cameras. It's the same every year. Blah, blah, Apocalyptic disaster, war for resources, yadda, yadda, Panem founded, great rebellion, Treaty of Treason, and so on and so forth. Ray has no idea how they manage to make a hundred natural disasters and two wars that make the deaths of twenty-three children every year necessary to keep the peace sound so boring.

In the rest of the boy sixteens line, no one else is paying attention. One of the richer town kids with a little handheld TV is trying- badly- to be discreet about watching re-plays of the Reaping in the other districts. Ray doesn't know him and isn't interested enough in them anyway to crowd in and try to get a look, but he does catch a glimpse of some of the faces as they pass by. He cringes to himself as he notices that there are at least three little kids this year- twelve-year-olds, and small ones, at that. 

Damn shame, he thinks. Then he thinks of his little brother and sister, and is thankful, for a moment, that it isn't them.

Ray looks back up at the stage and notices, with some slight distaste, that the mayor isn't alone up there. By tradition, the previous victors have to put in an appearance, and Frankie's already up there, looking jazzed and talking at Welsh, the only other District Twelve victor in the history of the Hunger Games.

It's always creepy for Ray to remember that they've been the underdogs (no, not even the underdogs- the canon fodder) for the last hundred years, and this time is no exception. The chill starts at the base of his skull, breaking the back of his neck out in goosebumps, and moves all the way down to his feet, so that his toes start twitching in his falling-apart shoes. 

How had they charted a path straight to the bottom so early and kept at it for so long? In the early Games, according to the mayor's narrative, there had been a lot of brave and bold volunteers. Had the arena just been so bad when they got there that they collapsed to the elements a couple times, and then just fallen eternally behind when every district but theirs kept taking home food prizes? As awful as he finds the Hunger Games to be, he also finds it acutely embarrassing that they always lose.

Onstage, Frankie points and laughs at something Ray can't find, but is willing to bet is some mother or little kid already sniffling for the sake of a child or sibling who has a lot of entries. Maybe even Ray's mother, though Ray hopes not.

Maybe he should be proud that Twelve always loses, he thinks. Maybe you just got to be a guy like Frankie to win, and Twelve as a whole happens to be out of stock on premium grade assholes.

Welsh doesn't look too amused by whatever Frankie's laughing at, either, and he pushes Frankie's pointing hand down to his side before he gives himself a nip from a hip flask. Welsh, from what Ray's observed, isn't a big drinker like some of the other former victors, but Ray's not surprised to see that he needs a little something-something to get him through the Reaping. If Ray ever won, he'd probably drink like a fish the whole day every year.

Besides those three, the stage also has Moffat, the Capitol escort that's sent every year to draw the names, and then bring back the so-called winners to the Capitol. He's not wild-looking like the other Capitol people- no crazy haircuts, tattoos, jewelry, or skin dyes, he just looks like a regular guy. Bordering on being totally nondescript, really. Ray's never seen another human being who so clearly embodied the definition of "average." He knows that's just a front, though. Moffat is notoriously a nutcase who makes the mentors and other escorts crazy with his rambles about etiquette being a trap that he can use to lull people into a false sense of security. For what, Ray doesn't know, and from what Irene- the only person he knows who's met the guy- has told him, Moffat himself doesn't know, either. He's just non-specifically paranoid. Ray is aware that it's mathematically impossible for Moffat to have fought in the wars, but he seems to be shell shocked from 'em, anyway. That's why Moffat's been stuck as the escort for District Twelve for as long as Ray can remember; no one wants to promote the guy to a district where he might have to talk more than for the Reaping.

By the end of the mayor's speech, Moffat already looks like he's gonna lose his damn mind. His posture's so stiff, Ray can tell he's the only Capitol escort that doesn't wear a wig, because it'd slide right off the back of his head from how high he's holding up his chin. His eyes are twitcy behind his oversized glasses and there's a muscle going in his cheek, like he's aware he's off-putting and that's why he'll never be promoted, and it hurts his pride. He takes to the podium looking like a guy who's just barely keeping it together.

Moffat clears his throat at the mic and says, in that maniacally stiff and soft voice of his, "Welcome to the Reaping of the eighty-first annual Hunger Games, and may the odds be ever in your favor." All escorts say some variation of this as part of the drawing, but Moffat says it wrong, like he doesn't really know how to human. Ray likes him for this, really; it's a step up from the escorts who always sound over the top with good cheer. 

He also likes that Moffat is always all business about it. He doesn't say anything while the two giant lottery balls are wheeled out and positioned on either side of him, and the only thing he says to announce the drawing's starting is, "As usual, ladies first." It's quick and nearly painless when he shoots his hand into the bowl on his right to grab a name.

Most escorts make a big show about sifting through the whole damn thing, like ooh, it could _really be anyone,_ and maybe it won't be some poor half-starved kid from the district's poorest neighborhood this year, like it always is. Not Moffat. He just grabs the first name his fingers happen to land on. 

Ray barely has time to wish, a little choked and desperate, _not Maria, please, not my sister,_ before Moffat's reading it out, so soft it's hard to hear. He doesn't even hear it, not really- what he hears is Frankie Zuko's snap of, "The _fuck_ did you just say?", and the startled murmurs of District Twelve.

Ray opens his eyes, his heart thudding away like it's already heard and knows the news ain't good, and tries to find the source of the upset. It hits him all at once that Frankie looks livid, Ma looks pitying, and Mrs. Zuko- not far from the stage where her son is raging- has burst into tears and thrown herself at her husband's neck.

Irene has gone pale.

"Irene Zuko," Moffat repeats, looking irritated that he has to. "The girl Tribute from District Twelve is Irene Zuko."

Ray remembers, when he was a kid, making color wheels in school. They had seemed magical to him then. When they were still, you had just a regular rainbow plate- simple, primary colors, for simple, basic facts. Irene's a rich kid; she's never taken the tessera but maybe once; her name can't be in there more than a small handful of times. It's an odds game, and the odds were more than just a little on her side, they were so stacked in her favor that _if_ anyone had thought to bet on her, they were the richest person in District Twelve right now.

But the thing about color wheels is, if you give 'em just one good flick, they'd spin around in a blur, making a thousand mix colors in a second, colors you can't even imagine, that you'd never thought you'd ever see. Ray's mind is spinning and spinning and he sees, simultaneously and for the first time, two things so bright and dark they're nauseous and overpowering: Ray Vecchio loves Irene Zuko. And Irene Zuko has just been condemned to die.

Up on the stage, Frankie's shirt mic has been cut while he snarls obscenities at Moffat and Welsh holds him back to keep him from doing something stupid. For a second, he wishes Welsh was dead in the arena instead of here to hold Frankie back; Ray has never wanted to see Frankie smash a person's face in so bad before in his life. 

Irene's ma is still crying and clinging to Irene's dad, not even looking at her daughter. Ray wishes they were dead, too. Why aren't they running to their little girl? Why aren't either of them trying to hold Irene's hand? Why are they making Irene take that long walk to the stage- which might as well be a Goddamned gallows- all by herself?

Ray follows Irene with his eyes, his feet rooted to the spot like they're trying to hold him back from doing something stupid, too, and tries to open his mouth to scream, _No, don't do it! Just run! I'll hold them off! You have to get out of here!_

Nothing comes out. It's like Ray's voice is dead, crushed and suffocated, under the weight of those two realizations. He loves her. She's dying. 

Irene makes it to the stage without missing a step. Somehow, she's grown up years in minutes, and doesn't flinch away from the news that her life has just become measurable in terms of days.

Too late, in Ray's opinion, Irene's mother reaches for her with one hand, the other clamped over her mouth to muffle her soul-rending wails. Her father keeps his arms around her mother, keeping her from running up there to hold her. Ray wishes he was dead twice.

Irene doesn't look, though. She climbs up each individual step with the poise of a ballerina, and reaches out to grab her brother's shoulder. Frankie looks at her, red-faced, his jaw clenched, and snaps at her something that Ray can neither hear nor properly make out on his lips. He'd guess telling her to sit back down, he'll handle this. Ray wants to laugh, sickly, from the thought. He'd love to see Frankie handle this. 

Whatever it was he said, Irene just shakes her head. She knows there's nothing he can do. She's already made peace with it. She wraps her arms around Frankie's neck and hugs him close, and for a second, Ray imagines Frankie cries.

Irene lets go of him and moves to Moffat at a nice, normal pace, like she's not even scared, and shakes his hand. He looks stiff and demented, as usual, like he doesn't even know how special the girl he's looking at is. He turns to the district at large, and calls out, "Are there any volunteers to stand in this Tribute's place?"

For one hysterical second, Ray hopes that someone will. He's running in his head through every girl he knows or has ever heard of, trying to think of any that might love Irene or like Irene or maybe just be so moved by how composed she's being with a knife at her throat that they're moved to try to be amazing like her.

The only sound is the wind rustling the leaves on the trees throughout the district. When Ray scans the crowd, he sees there aren't any raised hands, either. 

No one wants it to be Irene, but less than no one wants it to be _them._

Moffat nods, like he expected as much, and turns to the glass ball of boys' names.

And Ray falls over, laughing hysterically, when the name he reads is Raymond Vecchio.

\----

Ray finds himself blacking in and out, losing intermittent chunks of time. He does not remember getting up- or, more likely, being hauled to his feet by a Peacekeeper- and going to the stage. He doesn't remember Moffat calling for volunteers to take his place. He _does_ remember turning to face Irene and shake her hand for the cameras. She had looked far more stricken by his selection than her own. Her hand had trembled in his grasp, while tiny teardrops had made prisms on her eyelashes. He had been in such a daze that her touch and her image had been dazzling. He's sure that he had a dopey look on his face and that the headlines tomorrow will call him something like "the luckiest boy in the world," based on that dumbass expression.

He is reasonably sure that he got into the Justice Building from there on his own power, without having to be dragged or carried by anybody. If he strains, he gets something like the sound of his shoes squeaking on the marble floors, the feeling of his head whipping around to look at the long rows of paintings mounted on the walls. He can't remember what any of the paintings were of.

The elevator ride to this upper floor where the Tributes are kept is what gave him some small degree of clarity. Ray's never been in an elevator before, except for the clunky open grated one hanging from an electric winch they use for getting down to the deeper parts of the coal mines. He got to ride it on a field trip once. 

"Got"? No. "Got" isn't the right word. "Had to" is closer. He hadn't wanted to get into the damn thing and the whole ride down, he had been convinced that it would snap and he would die.

The Justice Building's elevator was only a little better. It was enclosed, so at least he didn't have to see whatever dark tunnel it passed through, but it huffed and puffed and creaked just like the mine elevator, just like it might give in and kill him, and that had woken him up to the fact that oh yeah, he only had a little while left to live. Funny, how he had forgotten that.

The room he's in now, at the end of a hallway the elevator opened to, is probably the prettiest he's ever seen. The walls are a deep orange-y red wood, polished to a shine, and the floor is done up in a thick, cream colored carpet that makes him feel like he's sinking ankle deep in a bowl of warm milk. There's fancy chairs and couches here in materials he's never seen before, but remind him of the texture of a horse's coat when he feels them: smooth and fuzzy one way, soft but a little prickly the other. They've got a printed pattern of cabbage roses that look big enough to eat him.

One wall is dedicated to the biggest and grandest fireplace he has ever seen, with a white pearlescent mantle on top, and a front made all of glass and probably-not-real gold. The fireplace at his house is barely a quarter this size, made of cast iron, standing on little feet in the living room with no door at all. A fireplace like this could probably warm up his entire house all by itself, so his whole family wouldn't have to huddle together on the living room floor in the winter.

There's flowers and sculptures and tapestries and little decorative boxes that turn out to be empty when he opens them everywhere in this room, but what there is not, Ray can't help but notice, is even one single window. Ray has never been a betting guy, but he'd bet his last dollar that that's so the Tributes can't jump.

He notices there isn't a clock in here, either, and he takes that as a kindness. If anything were going to make him try to find a window to jump out of right now, it would be a damn clock, ticking all of his suddenly precious seconds away while he watched.

Comforting thoughts to be having at a time like this. Way to be optimistic, Vecchio.

He has to be optimistic now, because any second, the Peacekeepers will walk in with his parents, his siblings, to have a few minutes to say goodbye to him before he's rushed to the Capitol. When they get here, they're going to see him, see how he's really feeling, and he can't let his mother think that he's already given up. Not Maria or Nando or Frannie, either. 

Pop won't care, Ray thinks, and for the first time in his life, he's glad of it. Glad of one less person he has to try to be strong for, and of one less person who'll be upset when he's inevitably killed by some Career gorilla live on national television. Glad of one less person who will miss him, that he will miss in return.

His idea of optimism is still a bit of a work in progress.

In the hallway outside the door, he can hear people coming, and making a lot of noise. He does his best to brace himself, and tries to focus on the positive- whatever the positive might be. He needs to look confident and calm when his family comes in.

When the door does open, it turns out to be an academic point. No one in his family looks at him. Ma, Frannie, Maria, and Nando all bodily pitch themselves at him, Ma hugging his head to her shoulder so he tight he's choking while Maria hangs on his side and each of the younger two anchors themselves to his legs. Ray feels as though he should collapse under their combined weight, but they seem to have perfectly balanced themselves. He not only can't fall, he can barely turn.

Pop, for his part, is pacing around and looking cagey, peering at every corner and statue and decorative box in search of a camera that might be filming this. Once he's assured himself of their privacy, he helps himself to a cigarette. 

Ma is sobbing and pawing at Ray's hair. "Oh, Raimundo, my baby," she cries. She says that over and over. _My baby, my baby, my baby, my baby._

Maria's cries are on the same kind of refrain. _I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm so, so sorry._

Ray can't make out what the littler ones are saying, but he guesses it's in the same vein. His pant legs are already soaked with tears and snot. A part of him wants to make a joke, admonishing them not to wreck his clothes, he has to look nice when he gets out to the Capitol, y'know, but he thinks that would only make all of them cry harder. Ray doesn't know what to do. He's never thought of himself as being this loved.

Pop, of all people, is the one who comes to his rescue. "Fuck's sake, Giovanna, would you get off him? Get the kids off him. You're making it worse. Jesus."

Ma releases him instantly, wiping her eyes and prying his brother and sisters off him one by one with a slight jerk of their hands. To Ray's chagrin, all four faces are red and messy with tears.

"So sorry," Ma says, and her voice sounds like she's got a lump the size of a stick ball crammed down her throat. She cups Ray's face in her hands. It sets Ray's skin to crawling, because he can't help the sense that she's trying to memorize his face for when she ends up never seeing it again.

"You're gonna try to win, aren't you?" Frannie asks, rubbing her eyes. Ray can't remember the last time he'd seen her cry over anything.

He tries to make a joke out of it. "Why?" he asks. "You wanna be rich and famous?"

Frannie refuses to humor him. "I don't care if we're rich and famous," she says. "But winning's the only way you can come home. And you have to come home. So you're gonna try to win. Right?"

"It figures that the first time you ever ask me for something, it's a tall order," Ray says. But her eyes are still so red and puffy and wet with tears that he can't keep it up. "Yeah, okay. I'll try."

"Promise?" Frannie asks.

"Yeah," he says. "I promise."

Frannie hugs his arm.

"Raimundo, I want you to have this," Ma says, looking grave. She takes her rosary out of her pocket and presses it into his hand, folding his fingers around it for him.

"Ma, this is yours," he says. More than just being hers, it's practically the only thing that is. It's definitely the only thing she has left from wherever she came from. This little string of beads is part of her identity, as far as Ray's concerned. He can't remember a day she's ever skipped out on holding it, whispering under her breath in a mix of languages some plea Ray's never understood, and her wishes for her family. He can't take this. It'd be less weird to take one of her _arms._

But Ma shakes her head and gives him a watery smile. "You can have one thing with you from home, yes?" she asks. "Then this what I want you to have. My faith. My prayers. The protection of God, that saved me from the sickness and the sea." She's tearing up again. "Please, my baby. Take it."

"Okay," he says. He tucks it into his jacket pocket, and wonders if they'll actually let him have it or if it'd be considered a potential weapon in the arena. He hopes they will. He doesn't get why it means so much to her, but it's enough to him that it does. He wants her to feel like she gave him those things to keep him safe. To feel like she's protecting him, in whatever small way she can.

Maria grabs his hand next and Ray has the weird sense that they're taking their goodbyes in turns, like they planned it in the elevator on their way up here. "I'll keep all your stuff clean and just like you left it," she promises- which is crazy, since it would be literally impossible to keep his stuff both clean _and_ just the way he left it, but he opts not to dispute the premise and nods anyway. He knows Maria's least favorite thing in the whole world is extra chores.

"When you get home," she says, pointedly avoiding the conditional in a way that brings a lump to his throat, "it'll be just like you never left."

That's literally impossible, too. Ray's seen victors in the news a lot (he supposes that they, reporters, just follow them around all the time, waiting for them to do something interesting- that'd be an enormous change right there). He knows their lives never go back to normal. Frankie used to be just a small-time jerk who occasionally took people's lunch money.

But he'd still rather take the gesture from his sister than argue the point. It's like he's been divided already into two halves- Ray Vecchio before and after, Hunger Games edition. All of the baiting, nitpicking, joking, teasing, fighting instincts are still there; he's just lost any urge to follow them. This is probably the last time he's ever going to see his family. He needs, even more than they do, for this moment to be something golden and bright he can use to keep himself warm in the arena.

For the first time in recorded history, Ray hugs his sister of his own volition. "Thanks," he says. "I owe you one."

Maria hugs him tight and nods.

Nando doesn't say anything when it's his turn to talk. He just looks at Ray like his heart's been torn out.

Ray pats his back. He can’t think of anything to say, either. “Thanks, kiddo” is what he ends up going with, and even he’s cringing at himself for the stupidity of it. _Thanks for caring if I die._ Fucking hell.

There’s an unmistakable sound of Peacekeeper boots out in the hallway, and Ray knows his time is almost up. In a few seconds, they’ll take his family away and bundle him on a train to the Capitol like a crate full of coal. A feeling of panic is starting to claw its way up from his belly into his throat, and maybe that’s why he flings himself into his mother’s arms one last time.

She grabs him so tight, he thinks it’s possible that he’ll be permanently stuck to her and they’ll have to find someone else. The thought makes him laugh, humorless and borderline psychotic, into her shoulder.

“I love you, Raimundo,” she whispers.

“I love you, too, Ma,” he says. Except it doesn’t seem like enough, just that one sentence, but he doesn’t have time to come up with anything else, so he says it again. “I love you, too.”

The door is opening and before the Peacekeeper can even say anything, Frannie’s bursting into tears. “I don’t want him to go, Mama,” she says, in a choked, whimpery voice that feels to Ray like being punched in the heart.

Only her youngest being so distressed could have ever pulled his ma away from her eldest at a time like this. She lets go of him to cuddle Frannie’s head to her shoulder and pat frantically at her hair. “Is going to be okay, Francesca,” Ma says, though she sounds like she’s going to start crying again, too. “Everything will be all right.”

“Ray,” Frannie cries, reaching her little hands towards him through their mother’s arms, and Ray has to close his eyes so he doesn’t see it. He can’t look at her like this right now, he just can’t.

The Peacekeeper’s already ushering them out, his hand on Ma’s shoulder, and Ray wants to punch him in his stupid fucking face. He grabs handfuls of his own hair near the temples to keep his hands from flying out against his will.

Suddenly, there’s a hand on _his_ shoulder, and Ray nearly lets fly before he realizes it’s Pop, looking at him all determined and conspiratory, like he’s actually got something important to say.

“Look, kid,” Pop says, focusing his eyes on Ray in a way he never has before. “You’re a fighter. You’ll get through it. But listen to your old man on this, okay?” The Peacekeeper is reaching for Pop now and Pop practically spits at him. “Fuck off, would ya? Give me a second to talk to my kid here.” 

The Peacekeeper sets his jaw and starts dragging Pop out by his shirt sleeve. But Pop keeps pulling towards him, and there’s a second Peacekeeper running in the room to help when he finally gives Ray his last word of advice. “When the chips are down in there,” he yells on his way to the door, “when the runts and the grunts are gone and it’s down to the wire, it better be _you_ , capisce? Not your pretty little Victor’s Village girlfriend, kid! Cut her loose! Make sure it’s _you!_ ”

The door closes on his family and they’re gone.

Ray is shaking so hard, he fears he might vomit all over the Justice Building’s carpet. He’s never hated his father so much before in his life.

It’s... what do you call it, irony, he thinks, that this is how he feels the first time he’s ever been sure his father loves him.


	5. Chapter 5

_District Three_

"Well, well," Stella's mother says, beaming at her with the kind of pride that Stella only sees once in a great while. "Look at you!" She brandishes a hand mirror at Stella like a winning hand of gin. Stella cringes away from it.

"I'm sure it's perfect, Mom," she says, which is true. Stella is never any less than the best-dressed kid at the Reaping. Her mother attacks it every year with the kind of determination you might expect to see in an actual Hunger Games Tribute. As if there might be a contest for that.

It has been an enormous embarrassment to Stella three years in a row. And her mother, as per usual, fails to notice.

"I wish I could get you a prettier dress," her mother is saying, shaking her head in dismay at the blue cotton pinafore that comprises this year's Reaping Day outfit. She brushes the shoulders for imaginary bits of dust, a gesture of maternal anxiety that Stella suspects she picked up from the television. Her mother is probably the least worried parent in the entire district. 

"Did you know," she continues, "when I was your age, they used to import real velvet and silk for Reaping Day?"

"Yes," Stella says, sharper than she means to. "You only tell me that every year."

Her mother's professionally arched eyebrows knit together in a disapproving frown. "I don't fancy your tone, young lady. What's gotten into you?"

Stella sighs. "Nothing, Mom. I'm sorry."

Rather than being appeased by this apology, her mother looks exasperated. "Are you fretting about Stanley?"

"Ray," Stella corrects, rather than answer the question. She fancies the idea of arguing about this again even less than her mother fancies her tone.

Her mother decides to have the argument without her. "Stella," she says, with a false air of patience that also sounds imitated from TV, "of course it would be very sad if he was chosen for the Games, but it's just the way the gears turn for people from the Narrows." She busies her hands with braiding Stella's hair. "You oughtn't let yourself get so attached to him, since it only upsets you."

Stella draws a breath in through her nose and starts timing in her head how long she can hold it. Perhaps if she refuses to play along, it will stop. Her mother can't fight with her without her cooperation, can she?

"Frankly, I don't know why people from that part of the district have children at all," she says. "It's an awful gamble."

_Fourteen, fifteen, sixteen,_ Stella counts in her head.

"When I think of what they must go through," her mother says with a tragic sigh and a pitying shake of her head. "Still, I suppose they must be credited for optimism and perseverance."

_Nineteen, twenty, twenty-one..._

Her mother seems to notice her refusal to respond, and tries to come up with something reassuring. "Don't worry your head about it, darling," she says. "After all, he's been lucky once."

That tears it. Stella looks over her shoulder and snaps, "His brother _died._ I wouldn't call that _lucky!_ "

Her mother tsks at her. "Not many children have older siblings that volunteer to take their place. It was very noble, and he should be very grateful."

"That doesn't make it luck," Stella says.

"Then what would you call it, dear?" she asks. She raises her eyebrows expectantly.

"Love," Stella says.

For a moment, it seems as though this might penetrate her mother's glib indifference to the Reaping and the people it disproportionately affects. Her expression is open, even vulnerable, and one of her hands has moved to her throat, as if to force down a lump.

But the moment passes, and the detached exterior returns in short order. "Oh, don't let's argue about it," her mother says. "It's a beautiful day, you look radiant, and it's a silly worry, anyway. No one could get chosen in the Reaping twice. It's four hundred to one against any particular person getting chosen at all."

It isn't, though, Stella thinks. It's four hundred to twenty-seven, the number of Ray's cumulative entries from his age and the times he's taken tessera. And he's come perilously close to being tossed in the arena already, how can she not worry that he'll be chosen again? When there's no one to step in for him this time?

No, Ray Kowalski doesn't have the worst chances in District Three. But his odds aren't great, either.

Explaining that to her mother seems like a one-way ticket to being dismissed in the most infuriating way possible, though, so Stella decides to let it go. “Of course, Mom.”

Her mother gives her a warm smile and strokes her cheek. “There’s a good girl. It’s almost time, so I’ll see you in the city center once I’ve put my face on. Remember, the entire world’s going to be watching, so try to smile and walk with your shoulders straight. If any reporters stop you for a comment, be polite and respectful. And above all, don’t say anything that could reflect badly on your father. All right?”

“All right,” she says.

Her mother kisses her forehead. “Happy Hunger Games, my darling.”

Stella presses a dutiful kiss to her mother’s cheek. “You, too.” The second her mother’s back is turned, she bolts for the kitchen.

She can already smell the traditional Reaping Day feast cooking before she even makes it halfway there.

Barbara operates their kitchen with the speed and efficiency of a six-armed muttation. She’s seasoning soup, basting turkey, and stirring either cake batter or pie filling- Stella isn’t sure which- all at the same time, to the tune of a song Stella doesn’t recognize, hummed under Barbara’s breath.

“That smells amazing,” Stella says, by way of greeting.

Barbara startles, then shakes a wooden spoon in her direction. “Oh, don’t sneak up on me,” she says. “That’s rude, you know.”

“Sorry,” says Stella, with genuine contrition. Barbara is always noise-shy and agitated on Reaping Day.

Barbara is also self-aware about it, so she immediately looks apologetic. “No, don’t worry about it, honey. I shouldn’ta snapped.” She sticks the wooden spoon back in the pot and looks Stella up and down. “That’s a pretty dress.”

Stella filches a few carrot pieces from the counter beside the soup pot and pops one in her mouth. “Thank you,” she says, with her mouth full.

Barbara makes a face. “Now _that’s_ rude. What would your mother say, huh?”

Stella swallows her carrot before answering. “Something horrible, probably.”

For this, she gets a tsk noise and a disapproving look. “What kind of thing is that to say? What crawled up your leg and bit ya, huh?” She gives Stella an admonishing tweak on the chin that betrays the nervous tremoring of her hand, and Stella has to repress the urge to tell her, _You don’t have to pretend it’s okay._

Instead, she opts for a pert, mischievous smile- or at least the closest imitation of one she can manage- and says, “I’m trying out a new Reaping Day tradition. I’m going to be surly and unpleasant, and not act like I’ve been looking forward to this all year.”

“Don’t you dare,” says Barbara, affecting a scandalized air. “My mother always told me to try to emulate my betters, so if you act rotten, I’ll act rotten, and then where will we be?”

Stella can’t stop herself from giggling and giving her a genuine smile. “At the forefront of a revolution,” she says. “A whole new kind of Hunger Games etiquette. We could write a book.”

Barbara looks a little sobered by the reminder of the upcoming Games, and the smile she gives Stella in return has a patently false ring. “You be on your best behavior,” she says. “Lord knows, we all need to be nice to each other today.”

Chastened, Stella nods. “Sorry.”

Barbara waves it away as a matter of no consequence before turning her attention back to the food. “It’s all starting in a half hour,” she says. “Shouldn’t you be there already?”

“I thought I’d wait and walk over with you,” Stella says.

“That’s sweet of you, honey, but I don’t have to wait in the check-in line and you do. You should just go ahead and get it over with. I’ll see you right after.”

The bitter truth is, even if Ray gets Reaped, she still will. It’s forbidden in District Three to take a half day off to grieve the possible loss of your only remaining child. You’re supposed to say your goodbyes in the Justice Building, smile for the cameras on your way out, then go about your day as usual.

Somewhat vengefully, Stella bites into another piece of carrot. 

Barbara reaches over and tugs on one of Stella’s braids- the same shade of blond as Barbara’s own in her youth, or so Stella’s been told. It’s not unusual on Reaping Day, when children are often far better dressed than their parents, for Barbara to be mistaken for her mother.

“Drop the sour puss,” Barbara says. “You only have to be proper for an hour. You do it like breathing any other day.”

“It’s not any other day,” Stella murmurs, barely loud enough to be heard.

Barbara hears, anyway, and allows some of her real feelings to show through. Her face goes pale and her eyes tear, and the weathered hand she presses to Stella’s cheek is visibly shaking this time. “I know it isn’t, sweet pea,” she whispers. “But you have to try, anyway.”

“It’s wrong,” Stella whispers back, and she isn’t even sure which thing she means. _It’s wrong that there are Hunger Games, it’s wrong that they make you act like this. It's wrong you have to spend this horrible day cooking for someone else's family. It’s wrong that your son died, and it’s wrong that today could be the last time you see the other one. All of this is wrong._

“I know, pumpkin.” She pronounces it “punkin” and for some reason, that makes Stella feel even worse.

“Why do you always call me food?” she asks, trying to make a joke out of it.

“‘Cause food is precious,” Barbara says, matter of fact. “Now go on.” A bolt of inspiration seems to hit her. “Stanley’s already there. You’ll be able to find him.”

“Girl fifteens aren’t that close to boy sixteens,” Stella says. “He’d be across the aisle and one row down.”

“You’ll be able to see him,” Barbara says. “I’m sure you both would like that.”

“You know your audience,” Stella admits.

“I know I do,” Barbara says. She gives her a gentle nudge at the small of her back. “Get going.”

Stella swipes another carrot and gets going.

She doesn't know why everyone has been so insistent that she leave early. The city center- where the Reaping is conducted every year in the long shadow of the glass and chrome Justice Building- is only two blocks away from her house.

The area around the city center is the prettiest part of District Three, the only part of the district that the Capitol's media crews like to film. The buildings are tall here, the sidewalks clean; trash is collected by charming little silver bots, barely more than ankle-high, that roll along the ground, pulling up refuse and debris that are sometimes as large as the bots themselves. There's even a selection of multi-colored bots decorating a few areas, that are designed to emulate birds Stella's teacher told her were called pigeons.

The Justice Building itself, shorter than many others nearby, is a glorious thing, a glass and steel series of triangles that are mechanized to fold into eight different shapes- a wedge, a cube, a hexagon; interior walls becoming exterior walls on a change of the wind- depending on what shape makes for the most comfortable interior temperature for the weather. It sits on a rotating plinth that follows the sun, absorbing its light to power the inside.

Here, it is said, is the truest testament to the Capitol's benevolence; a city whose technological proficiency and architectural opulence is only a generation or two behind the Capitol's own.

The Narrows, where the Kowalskis live, has a decidedly different picture.

Separated from the rest of the district by a stone drainage canal filled with chemical runoff (brilliant in color, but deadly to the touch, fordable only by the special-built ferries that cross twice a day) is a cluster of older, shabbier buildings designed with nothing but cold, austere functionality in mind.

The city center is filled with designers' studios, engineers' laboratories, and the offices of politicians that don't do much, as far as Stella can tell. The Narrows- so called because of their crowded, labyrinthine layout- contain the factories where everything is assembled. And where the workers who assemble it all live.

Stella has only been to the Narrows a small handful of times. The first year of secondary school calls for a field trip to the area, complete with a walking tour of the safest factories- the ones that make little gadgets for the Capitol, rather than the loud and hazardous ones where things like cars and hovercraft and engine parts for the Capitol's train are made. In those, she's heard, there's a constant, ear-shattering drone of tools and machines, sparks and tiny metal shards flying about from cutting and welding. Most of the workers are missing eyes or fingers or even whole hands and feet; the trip to see these is reserved for final year students who have shown little aptitude for the less hands-on parts of the mechanical manufacturing process (or, more often, fell just a point or two shy of the cut off for the classes for higher-paying work- the demand for such training is far higher than the supply).

The trip was a terrifying one even without seeing firsthand the crappier working conditions. The Narrows were dirty, crowded, and so bafflingly put together that even teachers in charge of the trips had difficulty not getting lost. There were stray animals on the streets there, feral and disease-bearing. People selling factory discards, stolen or broken things, liquor and morphling, small animals for food, and sometimes even other people. 

Kids her own age were often rough there, having grown up right on top of each other with no room to breathe and a stone's throw away from where it seemed like everyone had everything; they were embittered, angry, and constantly brawling. Sometimes their bodies were found in the street early in the morning, and when the news went 'round, it'd be whispered at school, _At least it wasn't in the Hunger Games._

Stella had been twice besides the field trip, both times to the Kowalskis'. Once when her grandfather was dying and her parents had gone to be with him, and Barbara hadn't wanted to leave her alone; once with Ray, without any of the four parents' permission. Their apartment consisted of an eat-in kitchen, a four-foot square sanitation room, and a single bedroom for four- now three- people.

Her mother had forbidden her to go there ever again. Stella still isn't sure if she was bothered more by the living conditions, or the fact that it was Ray.

It had been fine when they were small children, Stella remembers. When he was just the housekeeper's boy, friendly and boisterous, pulling Stella along by the hand while he de-snailed her mother's garden for five cents a snail. (Ray misses that job now, he says. Besides the money, snails were decent protein when he took the bucket home with them at the end of the day.) Her mother's attitude about it hadn't changed until a summer or two ago, when his voice had dropped an octave and he'd unexpectedly shot up to a couple inches taller than both their mothers.

She'd probably kill them both if she knew that Ray had kissed her.

Which is what he does, again, when he sees her in the city center.

Stella startles, biting his lip on instinct before she fully recognizes him as himself. She breaks off, giggling inappropriately. "What are you doing?" Another instinct asserts itself: she glances around to see if anybody saw. None of the other teens lining up to check in for the Reaping seem to have noticed them, and parents waiting on their children seem occupied supporting each other. The film crews who've come to televise the thing are too busy setting up their lights.

"Nice to see you, too," he says, rubbing at the small bloody spot she left on his lip. Just like last year, she's struck by how different he looks at the Reaping from how he usually looks. Gone are the ratty boots, holey jeans, and grease-stained shirts that are his regular ensemble, and in their place is a dove gray suit jacket over a freshly-pressed shirt and new slacks. His shaggy blond hair has been combed to within an inch of its life and slicked back with, by the smell of it, some kind of animal fat that has been boiled down. It looks all right, but Stella has to quash the embarrassing thought that he smells like breakfast.

It seems Ray can tell she's sniffing him. He gives her a slight, embarrassed sort of smile- his thin upper lip curling up so his teeth can settle against the fuller bottom one- and runs one of his hands over his hair, just skimming the surface, hardly touching it. "Yeah, I know. My mom did it."

"It looks weird," Stella says, reaching up one of her hands to follow the same path along his hair that his did. From what she can feel, it's absorbed the stuff very well; it feels more soft than oily. For a moment, she feels a near-overwhelming temptation to grab a handful and stroke along his scalp with her fingernails, like she might if they were alone and there was no one to see. He's got such an incredible weakness for her touching his hair. The temptation is not helped by the thought that this might be the last chance she'll ever get.

She forces herself to drop her hand back to her side and gives him a tentative smile. "I kind of like the smell, though."

Ray rolls his eyes. "Anyone ever tell you that for a town girl, you're really into food?"

"You have," she says. "At least once a day since I've known you."

"Yeah, well." He gives her a mock-humble smile and rolls one of his thin, wiry shoulders in a shrug. "I'm obversant like that."

"Observant," she corrects. She wishes she could take it back the second it's out of her mouth. Today's not the day to be nitpicking his vocabulary. Not with where they are. Her heart gives a nervous flutter as she tries to fight off the panicky thought- _Not him, not him, please, not him--_

Ray doesn't seem to notice. Stella correcting him has been a fact of life for just as long as he's teased her about her unseemly obsession with food. "Yeah, that," he agrees. "That's what I said."

Slowly, Stella gets her breathing and heartbeat back under control, and puts on a mask of calm she can't possibly feel. "I like your suit," she says, for lack of anything else to say but _We should go check in._ She'd be content to stand here, not getting checked in, until the damn thing was over.

Not that it'd help. The slips for the drawing were printed up weeks ago. His lot is already in there, all twenty-seven times.

Ray looks puzzled. Her regret flew under his radar, but Stella complimenting him on his clothes is unusual enough to pique his concern. "You okay?"

She considers lying. He doesn't seem to be terribly worried on his own behalf, and she doesn't want to ruin that for him with her growing anxiety. Then she thinks about how she'd feel if he went to the Capitol with one of the last things she ever said to him being a lie. "Not great," she admits.

Ray starts to reach for her shoulder, then stops himself when he seems to remember where they are. He stuffs his hands in his pockets to keep them penned away, and gives her one of his more reassuring looks. "Hey, in twenty minutes, it's all over but the crying, right?"

Stella's carefully-held breath puffs out of her in a sound that could've been a laugh or a sob if she wasn't trying so hard to hold onto her calm façade. "Right," she says.

The tortured look on Ray's face adds to her guilt. He's never been able to stand seeing her upset. "Okay, Stell," he says, turning sideways to wrap one of his arms around her shoulders, her mother and a million possible onlookers be damned. "Okay. Inhale, exhale, all that. It's gonna be fine. Look at my _face,_ okay? I swear to you, it's gonna be fine."

Stella takes in a few, great gulps of air. She wishes she could stand next to him throughout the Reaping. She feels like she's drowning in hatred for the Capitol, its Games, and the nasty-neat way it tries to package the whole event. She _would_ be able to be with him- and Barbara and his father could, too- if it weren't explicitly against the rules. After all, it wouldn't play well on TV if sobbing parents and girlfriends were in the same shot as the Tribute as he made his way to the stage.

All pretenses of calm and grace are slipping through her fingers. She clings tight to his side as he tries to steer her through the crowd, towards the lines for the check-in. They get all the way up to one of the stations before a frowning Peacekeeper pries them apart, pushing Stella in front of the entire line of girl fifteens.

No one complains. The thought pierces its way through the fear with its sheer absurdity, and Stella wants to laugh at herself, and the mere idea of anyone complaining about line-cutting at the Reaping.

The bored-looking woman at the table takes first her blood, then her name. Some small distance away, Stella can hear someone do the same to Ray, who howls and swears over a pinprick, just as he does every year.

Stella nearly trips over herself and at least three of the other girl fifteens trying to follow him with her eyes. Usually, she can count on his posture to give him away in a crowd- no one from town fidgets and slouches the way he does- but the city center is full of slouching, nervous kids from the Narrows today. Half are just as blond as he, and all are just as thin.

_I wish it could be nobody,_ Stella prays, tripping over her own feet until her shoes are shamefully scuffed. _But if it has to be somebody, please- please don't let it be him._

Each of the lines moves in a smooth, practiced formation into their traditional rows. Ten of the twelve groups have been through this before. Stella feels a brief stab of envy for the eighteens up at the front; none of them will ever have to do this again. She's too worried to feel pity for the twelves in the back. The tiny part of her that can still feel things like principles promises to feel sorry for them later.

The Capitol's anthem is playing over the loudspeakers, a video of that hateful red-gold eagle banner flapping in the breeze is playing on a giant screen mounted in front of the Justice Building. The real flags look much less grand, hanging limply from their poles and brackets, like the district itself is too sad for its children to even grace this event with a breeze.

Stella knows that she knows everyone on the stage- previous victors, the Capitol escort, people who put in this same appearance every year, and have attended modest dinner parties in her own house; her own father, District Three's mayor, is up there somewhere. But she can't focus on their faces, process them, match them to names. All she cares about now is that they get through this quickly.

Such a mercy is not forthcoming. They play that damn anthem three times, all the way through, before anyone steps up to speak.

"Citizens of District Three," she thinks she hears her father say, "welcome to every one of you! Happy Hunger Games!"

Three is one of the districts where they actually go along with this pretense that they're all just thrilled about this- one of the only ones, Stella has to admit, that wins often enough to even consider being thrilled about it- so the crowd around her responds with some applause and even a few cheers. She decides to make a game effort at turning off her own ears.

Small bits of the traditional speeches and ceremony filter through to her- her father's voice saying, "When my grandfather volunteered for his Games--"; the video greeting from President Bolt waxing poetic about bravery and honor and duty to your country; the highlights of the Treaty of Treason, "In penance for their uprising, each district shall offer up a male and a female between the ages of twelve and eighteen at a public Reaping--"; the obnoxious jokes from the Capitol's escort--

And then, the glide of wheels on the stage as the great glass globes full of names are pushed to the front.

Her head is spinning and her heart is pounding and she thinks she just might faint.

_Please,_ she thinks. _**Please.**_

"Let's see," the Capitol's escort says, "which of you lucky ladies is going to be the one to ride with me back to the Capitol, and fight for the honor of your district in the eighty-first annual Hunger Games!"

Stella looks frantically for Ray in the crowd, for any sign of him, one last look in the twenty remaining seconds before the boy Tribute's name is drawn and she collapses right here from either total desolation or sweet relief--

"And the female Tribute for District Three is--"

Where is he?

"--Stella Dubois!"

"What?" she says.

\---

It doesn't register right away. For a moment- five, ten, maybe even fifteen seconds pass where she lives in a half-state. The escort has read her name, and she's heard it; all of District Three, the entire Capitol, and half the country has heard it.

The escort has read her name, and she hasn't absorbed it. Hasn't made the connection. Cannot process what it means. The girl fifteens nearest to her are staring at her, and she doesn't know why. 

"Stella Dubois," the escort repeats, sounding irritated that she's ruining his grand presentation. "Is Stella Dubois here?"

Her feet set themselves in motion without her input. They walk her around the other girls, into the aisle way, and start carrying her towards the stage.

She's not sure what's happening now. She's not sure what just happened _then._ It all seems like some sort of mistake, some misunderstanding; maybe there's another Stella Dubois in District Three. It's not even that she's a town kid and town kids never get picked. It's just so far outside everything she had stressed over, and prayed against. She had been so worried about Ray, it hadn't even occurred to her to spare any anxiety for herself. Ray's name was in there nine times as many as hers. It hadn't made any logical sense to consider that she would be chosen ahead of him.

The escort beams down at her from the stage, motioning her up as if he's going to shower her with prizes. He's so jovial about it all that you'd think _he'd_ won the Games. He'd done this with Ray and his brother, too.

_I hate him,_ she thinks. _What was his name?_

On the stage, her father looks stone-faced and emotionless. His back has gone as straight as if a plank of wood had been shoved up his shirt. He's avoiding looking at her.

The escort is still motioning her up, still beaming down at her like a rainbow shot so far up his ass it's come out the other side. "Come on, dear," he coaxes, as if she were a timid puppy. "Come on."

Half a dozen past victors are watching her, looking bored and jaded. They've been through this too many times. They've gone numb to Tribute reactions. One- a red-haired girl scarcely older than Stella, who has the fashion of a town kid but the posture of someone from the Narrows- gives her a calculated look. Weighing. Measuring.

She isn't even in the arena yet and she's already prey.

The escort- Cahill? Is that his name?- is still making sounds like he's calling a dog to heel, and Stella wonders if she's really walking that slowly or if he's just that impatient. It could be either. She's still not really in charge of her feet.

When she finally mounts the stairs to the stage, her legs are shaking so bad that she's not sure how they haven't given out. It's the first thing that makes her realize she's actually afraid.

Cahill- she's almost sure now that's his name- takes her hand and takes on an air of solicitous host. "There now, that's a girl," he says, 

His hand on hers feels soft, manicured. This close, she can also see that his eyebrows are tattooed on in a green so dark it had looked brown from further away. They're outlined with tiny diamond studs pierced into his skin. Everything else about him is middle-aged and fatherly. Like he'd work in her dad's office if he was from District Three. The combination makes her head hurt. She wishes it was possible to put in a request for a new district escort.

Not that she'll ever need one after this.

"You poor thing," Cahill coos at her. "You look just starstruck!"

"Nervous," Stella says, then cringes as her own voice comes booming out of the loudspeakers. Cahill has turned up the sensitivity on his shirt mic to be able to pick up her voice, too.

He gives a delighted laugh. "Isn't that sweet? Well, don't be shy!" He turns to the crowd. "Everyone give a big hand of applause for Stella Dubois, District Three's newest Tribute!"

She gets one of the biggest rounds of applause in the history of District Three. Nearly three hundred kids from the Narrows are wordlessly screaming in pure rapture. _It was one of them! One of them! Not one of us!_

Cahill motions for quiet with an indulgent smile. "I know that many of you are probably excited on her behalf," he says, "so I hate to even ask- but does any one of you ladies out there wish to challenge her for the honor of being your district's champion? Would any of you like to be Tribute in her place?"

The silence is even more deafening than the applause.

Cahill, who Stella supposes must be used to District Three's paucity of volunteers, doesn't miss a beat. "Stella Dubois, your Tribute!"

There's another round of clapping, more subdued than the last. Stella wonders if her reaction is unsettling people.

"Now," Cahil says, "for the young gentleman!" He drops her hand and dances away from her- actually _fucking dances_ , like some kind of elf- to the other globe, and plunges his hand in.

He hasn't even selected a name yet before there's a familiar voice crying out, "Hey! I volunteer! Down here! I'm volunteering!"

Stella looks up, horrified, to see Ray running down the aisle way, waving his arms and shouting.

_What the hell is he doing?_

She starts to open her mouth to ask him as much, but Cahill gets there first. "Young man, I appreciate your eagerness, but I'm afraid you will just have to wait until after I've--"

Ray stumbles up the stage steps, suit jacket off and hair askew, tugging off his glasses to shove them into his pocket. "I volunteer," he gasps out, panting from the run. "Like, now. Don't bother. I'm the guy."

Stella can only stare.

For the first time all day, Cahill actually looks frazzled. "Well, that's quite brave, but the rules say--"

"Who cares, Damon?" This from her own father, sounding toneless and exhausted. "What difference does it really make?"

Stella wants to scream at him, _Every difference! Don't let him do this!_ , but the words won't come out. Her voice seems to have gone as limp and helpless as Cahill, who has begun to sag in his suit, trying to decide what to do. Silently, she wills him to overrule her father, proceed to a proper drawing, and disqualify Ray from volunteering on account of his interruption.

He shrugs, recovers, and brings Ray up on stage instead. "A volunteer!"

The applause for Ray is weak and scattered. People are confused. Everything from Ray's build to his accent is pure Narrows. Why would he ever volunteer? Not even to take a friend or a boyfriend or a relative's place- just for the hell of it.

"What's your name, son?" Cahill asks.

"Ray." He leans sideways, looking at- Stella thinks- the team of check-in people frantically scrolling through the census. He straightens up and corrects quickly, "Uh, S-Stanley Kowalski, but I go by Ray."

"Well, Stanley Kowalski, who goes by Ray," Cahill says, "it look like you're going with me to the Capitol!"

"That's great," Ray says, and Stella wants to push him off the stage and claw his face off. It isn't great! It's neck and neck with being reaped herself for the worst thing to happen to her today!

Why is he doing this?

Cahill, the only one of them who can actually ask that question, chooses not to. He chuckles and wraps his arms around each of their shoulders, pinching their necks to indicate when they should shake hands for the camera.

Stella can barely do it.

"Ladies and gentlemen of District Three, your Tributes- Stanley Kowalski and Stella Dubois!"

\---

Everything seems to suddenly speed up.

People are cheering and cameras are clicking and flashing while Cahill passes both of them off to a pair of Peacekeepers, like criminals under arrest. The Peacekeeper says something to her- what, she doesn't know; his voice reaches her ears warped and distorted.

She and Ray are ushered into the Justice Building, to separate elevators and separate rooms to see their families. The ride makes her woozy, and it doesn’t help her sense of time being out of order that her parents have somehow beat her up here.

Her father still looks frozen like a statue, while her mother looks lost, wringing her hands and murmuring, over and over, “She only had three entries. Her name was only in there three times.”

She ends up comforting them.

_I’ll be all right. I’m sure I’ll get sponsors. Maybe even allies. I’ll be very careful. Maybe the arena will be shaped like a city this year._

The words sound so falsely hopeful, Stella doesn’t feel like they really came from her.

They hug her, she thinks. It’s probably the last time she’ll ever be embraced by her parents and she doesn’t even feel it.

They’re taken back out as quickly as they came. No one says goodbye. Her mother’s disbelieving mantra- _”You only had three entries!”_ \- is still on a repeating loop. Her father, broken-looking, says only, “I’m sorry we never taught you what to do.”

“It’s okay,” she manages before they’re shut away. She wouldn’t have listened if he had.

Soon after, Cahill comes for her with a pair of Peacekeepers, to escort her to a car to the train station. In the hallway outside, she sees Ray's parents being led away while Ray is brought to join their entourage, and she gets an ache in her chest when she sees their faces. Damien looks old and stooped, his shoulders hunching like he's lost the strength to hold himself up. Barbara's shaking so hard that she can't walk on her own, leaning hard on a Peacekeeper who looks awkward and helpless. Both of them have clearly been crying.

Stella tries to give Barbara an apologetic look- something comforting, that she might remember when they're gone. But Barbara can't seem to look at her. They make eye contact for less than a second before she chokes up again and has to look away.

Barbara has always been kinder to her, and more familiar with her, than any hired help ever has. Stella has family members she loves less than she loves her, and that shattering half-glance is enough to make her wish she could just die right here. It seems impossible that life could ever be good again in a world where Barbara Kowalski looks at her like that, whether she survives the arena or not.

Ray tries to put his arm around her shoulder when he sees the look that passes between his girlfriend and his mother, but Stella shrugs his arm off. She still can't understand- doesn't want to understand- why he's done what he's done.

Cahill rambles cheerily at them the whole way to the train station, all about the wonderful things they're going to see and do in the Capitol. There's going to be a team of stylists to make them look their best, there's going to be a host of parties in their honor, the President himself may attend to say hello. Stella barely hears a word of it, and cares even less.

All she does is huddle in her seat, knees tucked into her chest, hiding her face in her arms. Peeking at Ray, one-eyed, over the groove of her elbow.

What has he done?

Doesn't he know he's just volunteered to kill her?


	6. Chapter 6

It's taken less than a day for Trickery Spring to pass in District Four. Out the window of the Children's Home, Victoria can see that the sky's gone gray and a thicker blanket of snow has fallen during the night to cover up all those little specks of green. The wind is in full vigor, rattling windows and whistling loud enough to hurt her ears a little.

Her ears aren't the only thing that hurts. She's spent over an hour trying to comb out tangled mats in her hair that have had a few months to settle in, and they're not going without a fight. She's broken three combs already, and she can see in the mirror some bright-colored spots where the teeth are lodged in. Wryly, she wonders if she can convince the Capitol that this is very fashionable in District Four. Or would Vice Consul Bolt take offense?

The dress he had waiting for her is beautiful, but ill-fitting, and so rich in design that Victoria feels embarrassed wearing it. It's made of some slick material that would remind her of water, if it wasn't bright red. As it is, she feels like she's been rolling in a pool of blood- a feeling that isn't helped by the way her capped sleeves and generous neckline (obviously designed with someone well-fed in mind) keep slipping. Pulling them back up gives her the morbid and creepy sensation of wiping it off.

She can see protruding ribs where her breasts would've been in her reflection. It makes her wince. She looks like she'd break in half from one solid blow. Like easy prey for the Careers of One and Two. 

Victoria's never been afraid of the Careers before. Up until yesterday, they'd been nothing more or less than her district's second greatest export. Now they're her enemies. The greatest threat to her continued survival. Not that she has especially high hopes for her survival.

A fourth comb breaks off in her hair, and she curses under her breath. She extracts it from her hair as best she can and tosses it in the bin by the sink. It's a lost cause. There's no fixing it. Maybe if she had had months of advance notice, or had some kind of loosening product to apply to it, she could've done something, but as it is, the best she can do is weave the parts she's managed to separate into the loosest French braid that she's ever seen on anyone. It seems to hide the damage well enough, even if there are little pink, blue, and yellow plastic teeth tangled up in it.

Bolt's provided her with shoes that match the dress, and to Victoria's horror, they have a much higher heel than she's used to. It makes her walk like a Goddamn drunk, and there's nothing she can do about that, either.

_Well,_ she thinks, smoothing her hands over her dress. _As long as I'm only broadcast from the front and standing still, I should look fine._

Hobbling and bracing herself with the wall, she heads out into the cold, following the path to where the Reaping will begin.

The lines at the check-in and at the foot of the stage where Greta Garbo died are pitifully small. At last year's Reaping, Victoria had been able to disappear into a veritable phalanx of potential Tributes; fifteens on either side of her, sixteens ahead, fourteens behind. Her Reaping dress had been several inches too short, moth-eaten and sun-bleached, but no one had really been able to see.

This year, in the girls' section, there are only a half-dozen twelves, perhaps ten thirteens. Three fourteens huddled together, not in formation, all looking even thinner and paler than she does. The older groups are gone.

There are no boys over twelve at all.

Victoria gets her finger stuck, her name matched on the census. It takes the woman an extra minute to find it. Victoria’s buried somewhere on a list of people who couldn't be found to fill out the survey, but presumed to be alive because they're still receiving tessera.

It occurs to Victoria to wonder for the first time if she even needs to volunteer. When the school was open, she'd never seen the need to be careful about how much tessera she took. The drawing had been irrelevant; whoever's name came out of the lottery ball, someone would volunteer to take their place. Often five or six someones, who would then have to draw straws with the escort. She had felt safe taking the food supplement every month without a second thought. Her name is probably in there a hundred times.

She can feel people staring at her in her terrible high-fashion dress, stumbling around in her shoes. She imagines she can hear speculation on where she had gotten it. _Probably stolen,_ she thinks they whisper. _Maybe looted from the ruins of the school- she knows how to get over the wall._

Victoria sets her jaw and walks to where the line of sixteens would have been with as much poise as her high heels and the iced-over asphalt will allow. She manages not to break her neck, anyway.

Bolt is standing on the stage, of course, with the cluster of past victors and the flamboyant Capitol escort whose name Victoria can never remember. He is looking at her with a self-satisfied gleam in his eye, as if Victoria is a prized show pony that is ready to take the blue ribbon, all thanks to his efforts. Victoria would like nothing more right now than to tear this stupid dress off and choke him with it.

She gives him her haughtiest look and hopes he can tell what she's thinking.

Somewhere from the back of the pavilion, Victoria hears the crowd starting to stir again, and when she glances over her shoulder, she immediately sees why. The Fraser boy has arrived in the circle, as polished and blank now as he had been at the execution yesterday, dressed in- of all things- the bright red dress uniform the Peacekeepers used to wear when Victoria was a child. They've been retired for a decade in favor of the white armor, and the age of his outfit is visible. She can see where seams have been repaired with thread of a much brighter shade, and a slight unevenness to his collar where the jacket has been hastily taken in to fit him. 

She envies how tall, broad, and solid the ensemble makes him look. He seems larger than life, like something out of history, too epic to ever be real. He looks _intimidating._ No one in the arena is going to go out of their way to hunt him unless they're much bigger.

He doesn't seem to notice the stares he's attracting as he makes his way to the check-in. He gives his blood sample without flinching and thanks the attendant when she dismisses him.

He takes a spot in the space where the boys his age would have been, a few feet ahead of scared twelve-year-olds, and a little to the side of her. He takes the hat from his head and gives her a polite nod.

So this is who Bolt intends to send to the arena with her. Victoria examines his height, his broadness of shoulder; the handsomeness of his face that practically cries out for sponsors to fling gifts at his feet. She could do much worse than being paired with Benton Fraser.

There is no ceremony surrounding this Reaping. Every other year has made a festival of it, with the national anthem playing at a dull roar all day long, hundreds of Capitol flags flapping in the breeze; with grandiose speeches from the President, the mayor, the victors, the escort; there would've been a dozen merchants making their way through the waiting families, selling food and hot drinks, and souvenirs of the day.

This year, they don't even play the anthem, and the flags are hanging at half-mast. There are no speeches. It's quiet as a tomb, save for the sound of the wind.

Victoria thinks she'd find it eerie, if she wasn't already so afraid.

The escort, a brunette who has dyed her skin metallic gold and tattooed her arms with elaborate silver fractals, hovers between the two globes full of name slips, looking as if she isn't sure if she should say anything or just dive right into the drawing. Even the customary polite declaration of "ladies first" seems to be beyond her. Half of Victoria hopes that the escort will try to make some kind of speech, draw this out, give her just one second, one second more, to live her life as herself, before she becomes just another pawn in the Capitol's Games. The other half just wants her to get it over with.

Victoria glances at Fraser and wonders if he's thinking the same thing. _Don't think about it,_ she tells herself. The last thing she needs to be doing right now is imagining the thoughts and feelings of the boy who will, in a matter of days, be her enemy. District loyalty only lasts until there are no other Tributes in the arena. If they both survive beyond the first few days, hunting each other will move further and further up the list of objectives. The only benefit to befriending him would be having a short term ally that she would have to pray would be killed by one of the other Tributes before it came down to him having to kill her. Victoria prefers not to take the chance.

The escort still looks frozen and overwhelmed, and the half of Victoria that wants this over with becomes a little stronger. If she has to keep waiting here, she'll lose her nerve.

One of the past victors seems to take pity- on the escort or the kids waiting for their death sentence, Victoria doesn't know- and steps to the escort's side to murmur something to her that Victoria can't hear. Whatever it is seems to unfreeze the escort, who gives them all an uneasy smile and falls into the traditional Reaping Day babbling.

"Welcome, families of District Four," she says. "And happy Hunger Games!"

The families of District Four give her a collective humorless look. If there has ever been a more unhappy Hunger Games in District Four, it must have been one of the earliest ones.

"I know we've all had a very trying time," the escort continues, "and the Capitol extends its deepest sympathies for your tragedy."

_Shut up,_ Victoria thinks. _Shut up, shut up, just get to the point._

"But," the escort perks up, "if we all put our best foot forward, I think we'll all rise from the ashes of this sorrow, and--" She falters. In the face of all these skinny and starving children, in a district that was previously known for its incredible hardiness and strength, she can't seem to come up with a nice, pat answer that will sound good on the news tonight. "Well. There's nowhere to go but up," she finishes lamely.

The victor who had whispered to her a moment ago now looks so stiff and proper that Victoria can't help but imagine a carefully-concealed agony of embarrassment going on below the surface.

Spitefully, Victoria hopes it is the most acute embarrassment she has ever felt. She's not of a mind to feel sympathetic or charitable right now. It's possible that every one of those people on stage know what's about to happen to her, and she hates them all for it on principle.

The escort delicately lifts her skirt above her ankles before sidling up to one of the globes. "In the meantime, and as always, ladies first."

Victoria takes a breath to steel herself, and thinks that she must be the first person in District Four's history to hope that her name will be drawn. She could almost get through this if she were to be selected by pure chance, instead of having to hear someone else be picked first, someone who could have been the one to die so that she doesn't have to, and raise her hand to say, "No, take me."

The escort takes her own sweet time digging through the slips- a habit, Victoria supposes, left from other drawings in better years. Eventually, she pulls a slip from the globe and reads, in a cheery voice, "Margaret Stern."

Victoria hears a gasp behind her from a younger girl, and has to grit her teeth and grind her heels into the snow to keep herself from turning to look. She doesn't want to see Margaret Stern, doesn't want to know what she looks like or how old she is or if her gasp was from fear or misguided delight. Victoria will hate that child with every fiber of her being for the rest of her life if she looks at her. It's bad enough she knows her name. She doesn't need a face to go with it.

Before she can change her mind- or let a look from Bolt change it for her- Victoria sticks her hand into the air.

The escort gives her a puzzled look. "Margaret?" she asks, sounding uncertain. The tradition is for the Tribute to come up to the stage after her name is called, not raise her hand like a kid in school asking permission to go to the bathroom.

Victoria casts a brief look at Bolt, and his subhuman smile. He spreads his hands in a gesture that reminds her of a teenage boy trying to look menacing. _Come and test me, if you think you can._

_The lady,_ she thinks, _or the tiger?_

"I volunteer," Victoria says. The escort gives her a flustered look, and Victoria can tell that she's about to start nattering about rules and traditions and waiting for the call for volunteers, so she repeats herself, louder and firmer, brooking no argument. " _I volunteer._ "

The escort gives in. "Well, then," she says. "Why don't you come up?"

Victoria just makes it up to the stage when she can hear a masculine voice behind her calling out, "I would like to volunteer as well."

The escort takes Victoria's arm to keep her from falling out of her shoes and off the stage, and casts a frustrated look in the Fraser boy's direction. "I haven't got to that part yet," she says, sounding cross.

Out of the corner of her eye, Victoria can see him giving the escort a look of polite inquiry. "Do you think it's necessary?" he asks.

The escort looks ready to tell him where he can stick it, but she recovers just in time. "I suppose it isn't," she says. "Come up, then."

There's a confused moment where Fraser tries to take his place beside the escort at the same time that she tries to pose Victoria in her difficult shoes on the appropriate side. The three of them end up in an awkward little dance around each other, jostling and jockeying for position until the escort is staggering back from both of them, fighting with her elaborate headpiece, and Victoria is listing sideways, precariously close to the edge. Fraser is the one to catch her before she falls.

This close, it is impossible for Victoria to avoid looking him full in the face, and her stomach jolts from the amount of concern she finds there. He's not looking at her as a future barrier to his own survival. He's looking at her like someone who hopes she hasn't sprained her ankle in these ridiculous shoes. Like her pain would matter. Like he cares.

Victoria extracts herself from his grip as best she can, and tries to compose herself. "Thank you," she says, a little stiffly.

Fraser nods. "You're welcome."

The escort wedges herself between them, and tries to recover the moment. "Why don't you introduce yourselves to the district?" she says.

"Ah. Yes," he says. He turns to the crowd, as if they don't remember going to an awards ceremony partly in his honor Goddamn yesterday, and says, in a calm, clear voice, "My name is Benton Fraser. And the lovely young woman at my side, if I recall correctly, is Victoria Metcalf."

Bolt seems to feel that he can't allow the publicity he imagined from their volunteering to go to waste, and jumps in to add, "I came here to present these two with medals of valor yesterday. Miss Metcalf was instrumental in the rescuing of Ludus Magnus' survivors, and young Mr. Fraser's father was the Peacekeeper who gave his life to the cause of saving them."

The escort looks impressed. "My goodness," she says, "not even in the arena yet, and you two are already heroes! It's an honor to meet you!"

Victoria dignifies this with nothing more than a look of disdain, while Fraser- evidently brought up with better manners- allows her a nod of his head and a quiet "Thank you very much."

The escort waits for more. Neither of them gives it to her. Finally, she gives an awkward little laugh, and turns to the crowd. "District Four," she says, waving her hands in their direction, "your Tributes!"

Victoria acknowledges their applause with the barest of nods. She's had about as much of this as she can stand. She steps out of the high heels and, stifling a wince at the ice under her bare feet, walks into the Justice Building. She doesn't look back to see if anyone follows.

The tile floors inside are only a little warmer, but at least she isn't killing herself walking across them. There's a staircase to one side of the block of elevators, with a guide hanging on the wall between them. It identifies the third floor as "Tribute's Row." Not that she even needs to look. Victoria remembers the way.

The room she settles in to wait looks exactly the same. The walls are sponge-painted in the palest blue and green, with a pearly seashell pattern in borders along the floor and ceiling. The floor is a pale wood in a repeating diamond pattern, and the chairs and sofas are striped in two different shades of white. She touches the back of one and remembers, with something resembling humor, being startled to discover that white came in different shades. Her mother had thought it very silly of her after.

Valerie's goodbye hadn't been sad. Their parents had been confident in her training. Valerie herself had been flush with excitement over the chance to do something like this for her district and her family. There had been nervousness, yes, but none of them had thought there was even the remotest chance that she wouldn't be coming back. Victoria had even been jealous, at the time; this glory could have been hers, if their parents had had enough money to send both of them to school.

Now it's her chance, and they're all dead. No one is coming to say goodbye.

Victoria lies on the nearest couch and folds one arm over her eyes. She couldn't sleep the night before. Maybe she can get a nap in now.

Down the hallway, she can hear others walking around. Fraser being escorted to his waiting room, Peacekeepers guarding it to make sure he doesn't run. In a minute or two, whatever family he has left now will say their farewells, and Victoria damn well hopes she'll be asleep before she has a chance to overhear it.

The odds are not in her favor.

The first thing she hears that lets her know this is not going to be a normal parting for the Fraser boy and whoever loves him enough to put themselves through this is the slamming of a door. Doors are never slammed in the Justice Building, or so Victoria imagines; she’s always assumed that the goodbyes between Tributes and their families were stupidly excited affairs, like the one that occurred in hers, or else sad, quiet things where people hold on as tight as they can until their time runs out. That door slam is neither. Someone is angry.

She can’t make out the words that pass between Fraser and the girl who’s come to see him off, but she can hear that it’s a girl, and that girl is around their own age. Sister, cousin, girlfriend? She doesn’t know. It’s probably a bad idea to try to guess.

The girl’s voice is high and livid, breaking the doleful silence that’s plagued the entire district since the fire in one explosive outburst for the entire world to hear. It sounds accusatory, maybe insulting.

Fraser’s response to whatever is said is even harder to hear, and comes through the walls separating them like a soothing hum. Apologetic. Entreating. Perhaps an explanation of Bolt’s ultimatum, with a plea for understanding.

It goes on in that vein for a while. The girl’s volume never seems to drop below “sharply furious,” and Fraser’s never rises above “gentle.” There’s a few seconds of quiet that Victoria imagines are spent in an embrace. Maybe a kiss or two.

But then there’s the sound of Peacekeeper boots on the floor, a door creaking, and the shouts are back, louder and more panicked than ever, and Victoria can’t help it, curiosity gets the best of her. She opens her own door just a crack, and peers out just in time to see a blond girl of fifteen or so being hauled away, tearful and struggling, and screaming at the top of her lungs.

“Ben, please! Ben, promise me that you’ll fight! You have to- _let go of me!_ Ben!” The girl flails wildly in the Peacekeepers’ grasp, her eyes haunted with the look of an animal in a trap, that knows how fruitless its struggle is. “You have to fight! You have to try! Ben, promise me that you’ll _fight!_ ”

No answer comes. Sobbing, the girl goes limp and lets herself get taken away.

And suddenly, Francis Bolt appears through Victoria’s gap in the door, smiling that horrible smile so that she jumps back like a cat. She thinks she can even feel all of her hair bristling.

He pushes the door open and gives her a look of pure, joyful malice. “So,” he says. “Are you ready to go?”


	7. Chapter 7

Victoria has the distinct feeling that she is not comporting herself in a way that is typical- or desired- for District Four Tributes.

She had done all right in the car, once Bolt was out of her sight- focused so intently on taking in the strange feeling of gliding over the street that she had not been able to acknowledge the escort gabbing at her with more than a few cursory polite noises, and had not acknowledged the Fraser boy at all. Boarding the train had been even easier; Tributes were not expected to do much more than climb its little stairway, perhaps flicking a glance back at their district before disappearing into the compartments. Under normal circumstances half the district would have been there to wave them off, but this year, there had been only the press, who seemed to prefer to take their pictures without the Tributes looking directly at them.

When she was shown the car that would be hers and only hers for the trip to the Capitol, all that had mattered to her was the ability to get out of that ill-fitting and ostentatious red dress, which was easy enough to do when the car contained an entire wardrobe, designed and fitted just for her. She had switched into jeans, a black tee, and a soft brown sweater to pull over it, which everyone she ran into agreed suited her well. So far, so good.

She had even put in a good, strong effort to pay attention when she was shown to her mentor, a brusque, no-nonsense woman with a pageboy haircut, who was nineteen if she was a day. (Victoria has a poor memory for all of the victors, even her own district's, but she manages to think, when she meets her, that this is the one that the press had nicknamed the Ice Queen. Whether for her commanding presence or unwelcoming demeanor is anybody's guess.)

Any further efforts Victoria might've made at acting like a proper Tribute, however, had been completely derailed once the train's staff had wheeled out their dinner carts.

 _Bread_ , she thinks, tearing it apart and buttering it with her fingers as she scarfs each piece down. Real bread, like the stuff she sometimes glimpsed at the bakery, not the hard ice biscuits she made for herself by mixing tessera grain with water and oil and left to freeze until it was hard enough to chew. And eggs! Beautiful fluffy ones topped with paper-thin ham slices, bright green herbs, and some yellow sauce Victoria can't name but tastes better than anything she's ever had. There's fruit on the side- cherries and grapes and strawberries and orange slices and little bits of melon- with a dark, aromatic cream to dip them in. She's dimly aware she's supposed to spear them on the wooden sticks provided before dipping them in the little pot- it's a communal pot, meant for the entire table to share- but she can't help grabbing things and dunking them wholesale, so the rich dark stuff keeps getting on her fingers so she can lick it off.

This doesn't even scratch the surface of how many things are on the little cart to try (out of the corner of her eye, she spots tiny onions and roasted potatoes and a carved up meat of some kind, browned on the outside and red and dripping in the middle), and the thought of pacing herself to have room for at least a bite of everything seems ludicrous. She's already uncomfortably full and a little sick, but she's determined to eat it all.

Her mentor looks less than best pleased.

"Miss Metcalf," she says, "do you think it would be possible for you to tear yourself away from the catering for a moment?" She pushes a tiny brown strand of hair away from her forehead to tuck it behind her ear, apparently as annoyed by it as she is by Victoria, and adds, "Or at the very least, use a fork?"

Victoria's mouth is too full of the roast- is this beef? Maybe lamb?- to answer, even if she had much of a mind to, so that all she can get out is a vague grunt.

Fraser is sitting next to her, not eating much of anything, and offers, in a polite sort of voice, "If you would allow me--" and begins to extend his own fork in her direction.

On instinct, Victoria slaps his hand to the table, pinning it there, and gives him a glare, daring him to come between her and her food.

Fraser looks momentarily startled, then so sympathetic it makes her a little nauseous. "It wasn't my intention to take it from you, Victoria," he murmurs.

She eyes him, assessing him for sincerity. As usual, at least for the brief time she's known him, Fraser is so very sincere that she's almost embarrassed. She lets his hand go and looks away.

Fraser sets his fork down on the side of her plate, offering it to her for her own use.

Victoria grabs it and begins using the side of the tines to saw through the rest of her roast. No one dares offer her a knife.

Her mentor gives a heavy, put-upon sigh, but seems more or less satisfied that the use of tools has slowed Victoria down enough that she can try to resume her speech. "As I was saying..."

"Oh- please continue," Fraser says.

She gives them both a weary look, but does, in fact, continue. "For those of you who may have been too preoccupied to hear it, my name is Meg Thatcher. I was the District Four victor two years ago, at the Seventy-Ninth Hunger Games. As you may have gathered from that, I am a graduate of our Ludus Magnus, unlike yourselves." Thatcher pauses as if trying to suss out whether or not this tidbit is awkward. She adds quickly, "And, as you may have further gathered, that means I was a volunteer- very much like yourselves."

Victoria eats three of the bite-sized roast chunks in rapid succession, wondering if Thatcher thinks this amount of common ground will inspire some sort of bonding. Perhaps she doesn't know that the two of them volunteered under duress.

She clears her throat. "In any case, I was selected this year to be your mentor. If you feel that you would prefer a different mentor when we get to the Capitol, that is a request you are within your rights to make, and it will be honored as promptly as possible. If you feel that you would prefer to have individual, separate mentors, that is also a request that you are within your rights to make, which will of course be honored promptly." She watches the two of them with an expectant look.

Victoria has no desire to put down her food long enough to answer, so Fraser jumps in. "Oh, no, this arrangement should be fine."

Thatcher glances at her with what Victoria can only describe as polite skepticism. "All right," she says. "If that's what you think is best. Do either of you have any questions for me?"

Victoria swallows another mouthful, this time after hardly chewing it, and has to wait for it to unstick itself from her throat before she can speak. "I have one."

She raises her eyebrows, apparently surprised to discover that Victoria has a voice and the will to use it for something besides demanding more food. "Yes?"

"Have you ever done this before?" Victoria asks. She grabs herself another roll while she waits for the answer. No sense letting it go to waste.

Thatcher has the less-than-best-pleased expression again. "Ah, no," she says. "I'm afraid that at last year's Games, I was- indisposed."

"Does 'indisposed' mean a nervous wreck?" she asks.

Fraser gives her a chiding look.

Thatcher does not look amused. "No," she says. "I attended the Games in the Capitol, and participated in the promotional tour, procuring sponsorships for our Tributes, and of course, passed the torch to the next victor."

Victoria tries to remember. "Six won last year, didn't they?"

"Eight," Thatcher corrects, her lips pursing as if it pains her to remember.

"I guess that at least you can say they didn't die on your watch," Victoria says, sipping at the ice cold orange juice they set at her elbow.

Thatcher is glowering at her like she's a particularly pernicious insect, so Fraser jumps in again. "I think what Victoria means to say," he says, "is that while this will be your first time as a mentor, we have every reason to be optimistic that you will be able to help us."

Victoria snorts. "Yeah," she says. " _That's_ what I meant." No one else at the table seems to have realized that Thatcher is a trained killer, who has had several opportunities in the Capitol to network with other trained killers and murder all of the people responsible for getting them here. As far as Victoria's concerned, the fact that she hasn't done so doesn't speak well for how willing Thatcher is to actually help them.

Perhaps some of this occurs to Thatcher after all, because she tries to smooth it over. "I would just like it on the record," she says, "that I am at least as confident in you as young Mr. Fraser says that you are in me. Just because the two of you haven't had proper training, does not mean that you should count yourselves out as potential victors of this year's Games."

Victoria laughs. "Really? You don't think so?" She props her elbow on the table so that Thatcher can see her wrist, pale and skeleton-thin. "I'm not exactly going to be able to wrestle anyone to the ground."

She waves that away. "Size doesn't matter like you might think," she says. "If you wish, I can certainly teach you to wrestle someone to the ground, even if they _are_ larger than you."

"Why?" Victoria asks. "Given everything that's happened in Four--" She inflects this with a cutting mock-dramatic edge that makes Fraser wince. "--no one would hold it against you if we lost."

"Because," Thatcher says, maddeningly patient, "this may come as a surprise to you, but I would prefer to see you prevail."

Victoria's sure that her own face reflects polite skepticism now. Or possibly, considering it's her and all, not-so-polite skepticism.

"It is a matter of district pride," Thatcher continues. "I would like to show that we can still win, even if we have suffered a setback."

Victoria laughs again. "Setback?"

Thatcher clenches her jaw. "Yes."

Victoria shakes her head and turns her attention back to her food. "You should probably focus on making him your victor," she says, jerking her head in Fraser's direction. "I don't think you can make one out of me."

Fraser looks awkward. "Ah," he says. "I'm afraid that isn't going to be possible."

Thatcher looks as though she could cheerfully strangle the both of them. "Oh? And why not?"

"Because," Fraser says, straightening his posture and meeting Thatcher's eyes head-on, in a way that makes even Victoria want to flinch away from it. "I'm afraid I've decided I won't be fighting in the Games."

Victoria startles enough to drop her fork. Thatcher looks horrified.

"I beg your pardon?" Thatcher asks, fighting to keep the incredulity out of her voice- and losing badly.

"My father didn't believe in the Hunger Games," Fraser says. "And neither do I.”

Victoria stares at him, and unbidden, the memory of the girl who parted with him in the Justice Building pushes itself to the forefront of her brain. _Promise me you'll fight!_

She guesses that makes sense now.

Thatcher is still flabbergasted. "What do you mean, you don't believe in the Hunger Games?" She doesn't wait for an answer. "The Hunger Games have been part of how we have maintained peace in Panem for nearly a hundred years."

"If you'll forgive my impertinence," Fraser says, "I'm not sure you can call the violent deaths of over a thousand children 'peace.'"

Victoria finds herself watching him with new interest. Everyone thinks that, she knows- she's seen pained looks and doleful sobbing over the years, when people didn't think she was there- but she's never seen anyone outright _say it_ before.

So the Fraser boy intends to stand up to the Capitol. She can't help but think, _Well. That takes my odds from one in twenty-four to one in twenty-three._ A few more like him, and she just might have a fighting chance.

Thatcher's clenching her teeth again. "That is sedition."

"Yes, I suppose it is," Fraser agrees. "However, it seems a bit of an academic point at this stage." He gestures broadly at their surroundings.

Victoria decides she likes him. Thatcher looks like she might kill him right here at the table, and his demeanor seems to suggest that they're talking about nothing more serious than the weather. He is going to be _very_ entertaining, once they get to the Capitol.

"Regardless of whether you believe in the Hunger Games," Thatcher says, "I assure you that the Hunger Games believe in _you._ There'll be no room in the arena for lofty philosophical ideas."

Fraser quirks his eyebrows like a shrug. "I would think the arena would be the best place for lofty philosophical ideas."

"Fraser, do you have some misunderstanding of what is going to happen once you've left the launchpad?" Thatcher asks.

"No misunderstanding," he says. He considers, then adds, "Perhaps incorrect expectations. Though I hope not."

She rubs the bridge of her nose as if she's getting a headache. "Fraser," she says, "this attitude will not protect you from the inner district alliance." Though she doesn't say so, Victoria knows she's thinking, _Or from the Gamemakers._ If he talks like this in the Capitol or the arena, odds are they'll arrange a very unpleasant accident for him when the fighting starts.

She should probably make sure there's plenty of distance between them, once they're there.

"I don't choose to believe we're as barbaric as they say," Fraser says. If he has any elaboration on that, he chooses not to share it.

Thatcher gives him a withering look before she turns to Victoria. "And you, Miss Metcalf?" she asks. "Do you have any... particular strategy?"

Victoria shrugs. "Staying alive for as long as possible?"

"Very good," she says. "We'll discuss some defensive possibilities when we arrive in the Capitol." She stands up. "I expect to see you in the Training Center first thing in the morning, after the opening ceremonies." She shoots Fraser one more look of pure loathing before she excuses herself from the car.

Victoria looks to Fraser once she's gone. He's discovered his food at last, picking forlornly at a roll. "You have a talent for aggravating people," she says. She tries, unsuccessfully, not to smile as she says it.

"Yes, I'm afraid it's a natural gift," Fraser replies, looking rueful.

She starts shredding and buttering another roll. "You shouldn't have told her that, you know. They can make you suffer in a lot of ways besides just tossing you in there."

"Their capacity for creativity there is nearly boundless," he agrees. "I know. But I prefer to be clear about my intentions. I wouldn't like to waste her time."

She snorts. "What difference does it make?" she asks. "She has lots of time. You only have a little left."

Fraser looks discomfitted, but seems to prefer to project a diplomatic image, so he says only, “All the same. It’s considerate to be courteous.”

“Courteous,” Victoria laughs. “If that’s what you want to call making your mentor hate you before we even get to the Capitol.”

His chiding look is back. “I’m sure she’s only caught off guard. I did, after all, give her quite a surprise.”

“Oh, yes,” Victoria says. “Yes, you definitely did that.” She gets to work on her roll shreds, eating these more slowly than she has the rest of her food, and resenting her stomach more and more with each bite. It feels like her own insides have allied together to spite her on purpose. They’re vehemently opposed to any more food, while her mind cries out for all the weight she’ll need to not keel over in the arena, and her tongue cries out for more of these incredible flavors. 

Victoria hasn’t had enough to eat even once since her family died. Looking back- something she doesn’t make a hobby of- she hadn’t ever really had enough before that.

In the interest of being polite- or so she supposes- she offers Fraser his fork back. "My hands will suit me fine," she explains, nodding at his plate. "You should eat."

Fraser waves it away. "No, please, help yourself."

Victoria lets out a scoffing sort of laugh. "They must pay Peacekeepers even more than I thought," she says. "I didn't think anyone outside the Ludus would ever turn down free food." Looking him over, he certainly doesn't seem to have starved. He's what her mother would've called a proper-sized boy, with long legs and broad shoulders. His only visible bones are the balls of his wrist joints. Everything else seems to be nicely padded out with musculature and a few good meals.

"Well enough," he says. "He taught me to hunt as well."

She shoots him a look of surprise- and, if she's honest with herself, of being grudgingly impressed. "That's against the law."

"Peacekeepers can be licensed for it," he says.

Ah. Of course, the Capitol wouldn't want their people in the districts to starve. "Figures." She considers what this skill of his means for her, since he's already said he won't be an enemy in the arena. "Are you any good?"

"I like to think so," he says. He must have guessed what she's thinking, because he adds, "But then, I doubt there will be rifles in the arena once we get there."

"You never know. They like to put good weapons in there sometimes." He's probably right, though. Guns would make it go by way too quickly. It wouldn't be very entertaining for the folks at home if the fastest one to the Cornucopia was able to end it all in a few quick shots.

"I suppose." Fraser looks as though he finds the prospect of shooting people in the arena distasteful, even if it was possible.

Victoria can't help but laugh. "You're going to have a very hard time when we get there."

"I would imagine," he says. "Though I'd imagine that anyone would. Wouldn't you?"

She blinks. She looks at her wrist on the table again, at how pale and bony her arm is. The veins in her hands stick out like an old woman's, and she can see the outline of each of her knuckle bones. She flexes her hand a little, watching her carpals become more prominent in her closed fist. She's not sure how close she is to starving, but she wouldn't be surprised to hear that she's more than halfway there.

She shoves the rest of her roll shreds into her mouth at once and swallows them, waiting for the mass to clear her gullet before she answers, "At least I won't go limp and die if I can't find something to eat on the first day."

Fraser looks startled. "I'm sorry, I wasn't trying to imply--"

"Doesn't matter." She drinks her juice. "Hopefully I can put on some more before we get there."

"I'm sure you will," he says. Then, as if he feels guilty, he offers her his plate.

Victoria takes it and begins eating more. "Is this what your dad used to eat?" she asks, mouth full, mostly to try and get the awkward, stricken look off his face.

It works. He looks surprised that she would care. "No," he says. "His mother and father were civil servants from the Capitol, but he was born in District Four."

Victoria raises her eyebrows. "Peacekeeper, son of Peacekeepers?"

"Librarians," Fraser corrects.

"We have a library?" She can't remember ever seeing one.

"We had one once," he says. "I'm afraid the Capitol decommissioned it sometime before you and I were born."

She acknowledges this with a grunt. Even if her mouth wasn't full, there's not much to say to that. "Are they back in the Capitol?"

"They're dead."

What a shock. "Your mother, too?"

Fraser's expression is becoming stonier by the minute. "Yes. When I was eight."

"Sorry, I guess." She'd probably be sorrier if it that wasn't a common story in District Four. Most families lose a child or two sometime, and hardly anyone gets old, even among the merchant families or the crabbers who go out for a few months every year into the most dangerous waters and come back rich. Her own father fell into this latter category, before.

"I don't have anyone, either," she offers.

His stony expression clears. "I wouldn't say I have no one," Fraser says. "I've got the troops for company when I feel the need."

She makes a face. "You mean the Peacekeepers?"

He laughs. "No," he says. "It's what my father used to call our dogs."

"Dogs?"

Fraser nods. "Thirteen of them," he says. "And if you think I'm well fed, they border on spoiled."

Victoria isn't sure how to feel about this. Occasionally, you get a pet in District Four- if a rabbit or chicken never plumps up enough to eat. The idea of keeping animals and spoiling them seems to her like an extravagant waste of money.

Then again, the main thing Peacekeepers must want for in the districts is any kind of company. She can't imagine there's anywhere they're treated as welcome.

Besides, dogs are probably good at hunting.

"That must be nice," she allows.

He nods again. "Canines- that is, dogs and animals like dogs- are very intelligent and loyal creatures. They become very protective of their human companions. My mother once told me that, when she was very young, she happened to befriend a wild fox. Foxes are notoriously difficult to tame, but hers more or less domesticated himself. He would bring her mice and squirrels, and sometimes rabbits. It kept her family from going hungry many a winter."

This, Victoria can envy. An animal wouldn't be penalized for borrowing under the fence and poaching himself a nice dinner. She has seen the occasional fox in the woods, but she's taught them to keep away with a few well-aimed rocks. It's never occurred to her to try and catch one. The thought of so much fat and protein that she's missed out on not trying to make friends with one makes even her overfull stomach gurgle with loss.

"You use the dogs for hunting, then?"

"Occasionally," he says. "But most of them are lazy and don't care much for it."

She snorts. "I see what you mean by spoiled."

Fraser smiles. "Very."

Her stomach jolts, and abruptly, it dawns on her that Fraser has never smiled at her like this before. In fact, no one has. It’s just as startling to realize that she likes it.

She narrows her eyes at him suspiciously. His father could manipulate her into going over the wall during a fire with just a trusting gaze, he probably has the ability to do the same.

His smile is quickly replaced by a look of concern. “Is something wrong?”

Victoria replays the last few minutes of their conversation in her head. They’ve been acting like a matchmaker’s pair on a first meeting, talking about their families and what they get up to back in District Four. Fraser moreso than her, obviously, but she had just gone along with it- asking about his mother and his grandparents and his dogs. Somehow, he had tricked her into forgetting for a few minutes that her survival depends on his future violent death.

He’s still giving her that questioning, concerned look, and Victoria digs more at the history of their interactions. He’d not only tricked her into being at ease, he’d tricked her into thinking that she _likes_ him. That she might enjoy being around him for the next few days in the Capitol.

Was this how he was expecting to survive in the arena? Disarming the other Tributes with a smile and some pleasant chatter, so that no one will want to kill him? 

Is he already using such a tactic on her?

“Victoria?” he asks, looking confused.

Suddenly, nothing seems as appealing to her as getting very far away from this boy, who may not have any training with weapons but has definitely taught himself how to influence people. 

She looks away. “Nothing,” she says. “Just thinking.” In a matter of seconds, she clears the remaining contents of her plate- her stomach wrenches painfully, like she might be about to vomit- and she stands up. “I’m going to get some rest.”

“Are you all right?” he asks, standing up, too.

Victoria starts edging back from him as quickly as she can. “Fine,” she says. “Just tired.”

Fraser looks befuddled, but nods. “If you should need any assistance--”

 _I won’t get it from you,_ she thinks, but she gives him a careless, casual sort of nod. “I’ll let you know.” She turns away and rushes from the compartment as fast as she can, resolving to have as little as possible to do with the Fraser boy from now on.

He doesn't look it, but she thinks he just might be the most dangerous one of all.


	8. Chapter 8

"That hair is going to have to go."

Stella pauses in the middle of eating what is quite possibly the most fabulous meal of her life so far to look up. "What?"

The red-haired girl who scrutinized her in front of the Justice Building, during the Reaping, is- it turns out- not just a former victor, but the one who has been elected this year by the other District Three victors to serve as their mentor. Up close, Stella can see that she is not as young as she had initially appeared; she's easily ten years older than Stella, if not fifteen. The wealth from her victory has gone into astonishing maintenance on her appearance, and it is difficult to tell what age she really is. The tip-off that she's a full-grown adult is her name- Louise St. Laurent. It is not the name of any of the District Three victors that have won in the time since Stella's been old enough to remember, so she must have won when Stella was very small. Then again, it's just as possible that she won before Stella was even born. Not even her own mother has skin this pale and smooth; it has obviously been chemically or surgically treated by the Capitol to have the flawlessness of a newborn's. 

Stella wishes she hadn't noticed. She's unable to stop herself from wondering what _else_ might have been altered. She doesn't think she's ever seen a red so vivid on any other human being.

Ray, for his part, is still focusing on the meal. Only on Stella's birthdays has he ever had access to this much food, and even between his mother's cooking and what Stella's parents can afford, it has never been food this good. If Stella was speaking to him, he would probably be reminding her to eat while she listens. Heaven knows how soon it'll be before the train's kitchen staff takes it all away and brings out something else.

"Your hair," Louise repeats. She is sitting across from them, her chin propped on her hand, and not touching any of the food on the plate in front of her. She's as cadaverously thin as any current resident of the Narrows, and Stella can't imagine how it's possible for her to not be hungry. Then again, she guesses that winning the Games might be the kind of thing that could put someone off of food for life.

"What about it?" Stella asks. She quickly spears a few pearl onions on her fork and shoves them in her mouth before she grabs a lock of her hair to scrutinize it. She can't see anything really wrong. The ends are neat, and she's even got some nice-looking waves in from where she's taken her Reaping braids out. Her blonde isn't so bright as Louise's red, but it seems a nice enough color, anyway.

"It's too long," Louise says. "Not just yours, his, too. Both of you are getting a haircut once we get to the Capitol."

This gets Ray to look up. "Why?" He looks startled. His hair is long for a boy's, his fringes long enough to reach his eyebrows, his ends in the back nearly touching his shoulders- but it's never been an issue before. His mother despairs for a time when she knew what his ears looked like, and Stella's mother has commented- as politely as possible- on how it makes him look a little slovenly and effeminate, but their opinions aren't the ones that count. Stella's is, and Stella loves to run her fingers through the sloppy, moppy blond hair that he couldn't afford to trim, anyway.

Or at least, that was what mattered back in Three. Stella's not so sure any more that her opinion counts to him for anything, what with him _being on this train in the first place._

She shoots a poisonous look in his direction, and Ray shoots her a helpless one back. He seems unprepared for being assaulted from both sides, and he scoots a little back, looking overwhelmed.

If Louise notices that her Tributes seem to be having some friction, she doesn't let on. She keeps examining them like a secondhand merch dealer in the Narrows, like she's trying to figure out what a good price for them would be. "It'll be a liability in the arena," she says, "if there's any dense tree cover, or if any of the other Tributes try to grab you by it. The stylists like you to be as pretty as possible for the sponsors, but I don't think you two need to be any prettier."

Stella watches as Ray's expression brightens for a few seconds at the implicit compliment, and then sags again as the rest of the sentence sinks in. "Oh," he says.

"Three doesn't usually have trouble with sponsors," Louise continues. "Our problem is that we're usually weak and underprepared out there. Seven, Nine, Ten, and Eleven have hard industries that put a lot of demand on the body- lumber, livestock, and agriculture. Every bite of food you've ever eaten comes from Nine and Eleven- and Ten if you've had any meat. It's murderous work, and they've got the builds to show for it. One, Two, and Four have Tribute schools, and Two's got demanding labor on top of it. so they've got twice the physical advantage. Even Twelve gets half its food from poaching, so their Tributes know how to survive in the woods and how to kill things."

"Hasn't done 'em a lot of good so far," Ray notes.

Louise gives him a look so cold, Ray seems to shiver for a second. "Twelve has had winners," Louise says. "They're few and far between, but they can be the worst if it's someone older who's hunted before." She looks them over again. "Hardly an advantage I'd give the two of you." Her eyes seem to be lingering on Stella's hands, where she's going through her silverware in the proper order for etiquette demands.

Stella blushes and puts it down.

"Hey, I've won fights before," Ray says. "I'm not one of the rich kids from the city. I know how to handle myself." He pauses to shoot a guilty glance at Stella. "Sorry. No offense."

Stella purses her lips and ignores him.

Louise rolls her eyes. "You've been in street brawls," she says, "with kids that probably don't weigh any more than you do, and haven't had any training. You're going to be in an arena with six pre-programmed killers who've handled weapons, and been taught to see you as the only barrier between them and going home. Any advantage I can give you is one you had better accept."

Ray puts his hands up. "Okay, okay," he says. "Fine. I'll get a haircut."

"You're also going to practice with every possible thing you can get your hands on in the Training Center," Louise says. She looks to Stella. "That goes for you, too. Both of you had better learn camouflage, edible plants, navigation, tracking, and any weapon you think you can lift."

Stella bites her lip. "I don't know if I can do that."

Louise's glance at her is unsympathetic. "You will or you'll die," she says. "My last Tributes didn't make it home. One of you is going to, if I have to have knives surgically attached to your hands."

Far from being comforted by this, Stella gets the feeling that it's a point of pride with Louise- that her last Tributes had disappointed her by dying, and she would prefer not to be embarrassed in that way again.

"Wouldn't that be cheating?" Ray asks, trying to make a joke out of it. He gives Stella a hopeful look, like he's seeking her approval.

This sets off Louise. "Excuse me," she snaps, "but one of my last Tributes was your brother. The way he went was damn unpleasant, for him and for all of us. I would think you would be taking this a little more seriously."

Ray's face flushes hot with humiliation and pain, as if she's prodded him with a sharp stick in an old wound that hasn't quite healed.

Stella's heart betrays her for a moment, bursting with the desire to comfort him over his brother's death, or at least defend him to Louise, but her rational mind stamps it all down. _He chose to be in here,_ she thinks. _He **volunteered.** He didn't even wait for them to pick someone else first. He just jumped and did it, never mind what that would do to me or to his family._

"Don't take it personally, Louise," Stella says, in the kind of dead voice she hasn't really been able to break out of since the Reaping. "He's fallen into being naturally inconsiderate for the day." She stabs her last few onions with far more violence than necessary and eats them in one bite before shoving herself away from the table. "Please excuse me." She's barely halfway down the aisle before she can hear Ray calling after her.

"Stella!" he shouts. "Hey, Stella! What the--"

She slides open the compartment door, steps out, and slams it behind her before she can hear any more.

_I can't deal with this,_ she thinks. Ray was never meant for the arena. Hadn't she spent the last three Reapings praying that it wouldn't be him? Wishing- and hating herself for those wishes- that it would be someone else? Even someone else who was just as young and hopeless and likely to be killed as he is? Stella has had to live with it on her conscience that she was _thankful_ when some twelve-year-old child was sent off to die, just because that child wasn't him. And he has thrown all of that away- all of the time she has spent worrying and wishing and praying for him- in one great big gesture, and Stella doesn't even know why.

Why would he do this? Why would he volunteer for this? Why would he sign up to kill or be killed at all- especially when she's going to be right there next to him, unable to go home as long as he's alive?

Though, if she's honest with herself, she has to admit, she already knows she isn't going home.

Stella has seen kids like her before in the arena- town kids, the more well-fed and educated of their districts. They never last very long. They usually die the fastest, in the thirty-minute bloodbath at the Cornucopia. They always think they'll be fast enough to run in there, grab what they need, and get out, and not once in Stella's entire life has that been true. The Careers from One, Two, and Four make quick, brutal work of them, and then move on to the younger kids who were smart enough to run away but haven't any other skills to protect themselves.

Is that going to be her? She doesn't think she'd try to brave the Cornucopia- not after the things she's seen- but then, those kids have all grown up seeing the same thing. Something makes them try, anyway.

_Maybe it's the arena,_ she thinks. That would make sense. Its environment is completely artificial, controlled right down to the smallest shift in temperature by the Gamemakers. Maybe they release some sort of drug into the air that compromises judgment, so that any plans from before the Games started are abandoned as soon as the clock runs out, and kids who knew better before the launch go running straight to their deaths.

_Or maybe,_ she thinks, _it's just the fear of being out there with nothing._

She sighs and throws herself into the nearest seat, staring out the window. She had hoped, for a second when they first came onboard, that she would get to see some of the other districts here on the train. But there's nothing. The train tracks leading from District Three are all subterranean. It's dark down here, with nothing but the same kind of gray concrete and durasteel walls that surround District Three itself. There's an occasional splash of graffiti to break up the monotony, which she supposes must have been done by bored Peacekeepers or train staff. Or else the raiders from the out-districts that get mentioned from time to time on the news, though she's skeptical that they could get all the way down here without getting caught.

That skepticism lasts all the way up until she sees a pile of human skeletons under one such graffiti mural, with gouges in the walls from ricocheted bullets, and her stomach churns and tries to curl in on itself, away from the image. The worst part is that it doesn't really shock her. The sight should be strange, alien and grotesque, but it penetrates her mind with a horror of recognition.

This is what it looks like in the Narrows at night.

She presses her forehead against the glass and stares at it like a Peeping Tom, imagining the way her mother would swat her on the arm and scold her for gawping. _It isn't decent,_ she imagines her saying, _for a lady to stare, let alone at such things. Look away and try to occupy your mind with something pleasant until it passes._

Stella nearly laughs, dead and tired, at the thought. She can't look away. That macabre display of grime, delinquency, and death may be the last thing she's going to see that's anything like home.

The door to the compartment slides open, startling her out of her thoughts, but she peers more intently out the window, at the skeletons growing smaller and smaller in the distance. "Go away, Ray," she says.

"If you'd rather sit out here moping than learn how to maximize your chances of survival, then certainly," Louise replies waspishly. "I've no problem with focusing my efforts on only one of you. It'll save me a hard choice later."

Stella startles again, jerking her head away from the window to look in the dark, narrowed eyes of her mentor. "Sorry," she says. "I thought you were someone else."

"I noticed," Louise says. She takes a seat across from Stella, arranging her tailored, formal skirts around her to lay in smooth, unwrinkled lines. "Is it helping?" she asks, after a minute or two of silence.

"Is what helping?" Stella asks.

"Moping," Louise says, "about your predicament and the loss of your impractical principles."

Stella makes a face. "If not wanting to kill people is an impractical principle," she says, "then I'd rather be a useless dandy my whole life."

Louise rolls her eyes. "They're perfectly fine principles," she says, though there's an edge of mocking to her voice that Stella can't help but notice and bristle at, "when you _aren't_ going into the Hunger Games. As it is, the only principle you should have now is the determination to see yourself get through this alive."

"I think I'm missing that one," Stella says.

"So you've already given up, then," Louise says, arching one of her delicately shaped red brows. "Because you think it's noble?"

"I don't think it's noble," she says. "I think it's realistic." She glances down at one of her arms, thin as a chicken bone even with a lifetime of access to three whole meals a day. There's hardly any muscle on her for scrabbling with a larger opponent for her food or weapons or her own survival, let alone a few pounds of puppy fat that could at least insulate her for a few days against the hunger. She hasn't any skills for hunting animals, or gathering plants. Once she's in there, she won't have a single advantage, other than maybe being pretty enough for one of the Career boys to claim as a pet. She's seen that happen once or twice before. The idea makes her want to puke.

Louise rolls her eyes again. "Realistic if that's the attitude you're going to bring to it," she says. "Fatalism in the arena will get you exactly where you're planning to go."

"Oh, so you think I should be hopeful instead?" Stella asks. "That I can- what, will myself to winning with a bright enough smile?"

"I think you shouldn't count yourself out yet," Louise says.

"I shouldn't?" She glares. "Because it's not like I'm going to be up against six Careers in there or anything."

The look Louise gives her in return is the same one she gave her in the Reaping- that weighing and testing look, as if measuring her for worthiness. Her face slips back into its cool, detached mask, and she tucks some of her hair behind her ear before striking a false-casual pose. "No one's supposed to tell you this," she says, in a manner like one about to inform her that she's accidentally tucked her skirt into her underwear, "but there are _not_ six Careers this year. District Four lost all of theirs in- in an accident. Their Tributes aren't any more talented than you, and by the look of the girl they're sending, there's a decent chance they'll be much less."

Stella fights to keep her jaw from dropping. "What?"

Louise's expression doesn't change, but her eyes take on a self-satisfied gleam, as though she's thinking, _Ah, now there's the attitude adjustment I wanted._ "She's skinny," she adds, "and a little wild-looking. Some kind of forest orphan who keeps to herself, or so the gossip goes. The boy's not much better. He's had a few decent meals, but he lives on the outskirts of the district, too. Mostly gifted in manners and raising dogs."

Stella takes that in. Two fewer Careers isn't the best news she's ever heard- there'll still be four more, after all- but if they're also lesser skilled kids who don't want to be there, that means potential allies. It might not be enough to get her through the Games, but it could very well be the difference between whether or not she dies on the first day. And if they live away from civilization in their own districts, it's possible that they might even know a thing or two about surviving with nothing, so that none of them will try to brave the Cornucopia.

Tributes aren't supposed to know anything about each other before they get to the Training Center. This kind of information is supposed to be the kind she gets on her own, talking to the others during training and the press tour before the Games begin- when Tributes are most likely going to be at their most wary and least forthcoming, so that you might never find out anything useful about them at all.

"Can't you get in trouble for telling me that?" Stella asks.

Louise shrugs. "I lost my family before my own Reaping," she says. "And I've never really been the type that makes friends. They don't have anyone they can use to hurt me. The only thing I have to care about in these Games is the two of you."

Stella tries to picture what that would be like. Lonely, she's sure, but at the same time, how very freeing, to be able to say whatever you want without any fear of Capitol reprisals. Victors are too much in the public eye to be tortured or killed by the Capitol directly, so the damage they can deal to loved ones is the only card they have to play. Louise's hard-nosed, unpleasant demeanor has been her greatest asset to getting out from under them, in a way that none of the rest of them ever can.

As cold-blooded and eerie as it is, Stella can't help but admire the genius of it.

Then the rest of her statement sinks in and Stella wonders aloud, "Couldn't they get to you through us? By having the Gamemakers throw something terrible at us in the arena?"

Louise shrugs. "If you think they weren't going to do that anyway," she says, "you're not as smart as I was hoping you are."

Stella digests this. "Okay," she says. "I guess... yeah, I guess that makes sense."

Louise gives her a grimly satisfied nod.

Stella bites her lip as she remembers, "What did you mean before? That I'd be saving you a hard choice later?"

To Stella's surprise, she laughs. "You really aren't as smart as I was hoping," she says.

Stella glares. "I wouldn't have thought you'd care about us at all," she says. "Excuse me for not figuring out all the angles of that yet."

Louise accepts this with an acknowledging wave of her hand. "Fine," she says. "Fine. Just remember this, then, when you're thinking about who to make friends with." She sits forward, resting her elbows on her knees and looking at Stella so intently that it makes her want to shudder. "Twenty-four go into the arena. Only one comes out. When push comes to shove... I can only help one of you."

And with that startling pronouncement, she stands, smooths out her skirts, and walks back out the door.


	9. Chapter 9

This, Ray thinks, is the most awkward train ride in the history of the Hunger Games. It has to be. A more awkward ride would've killed whoever took it before they got there.

No one's said a word since they left the station in District Twelve. Moffat, his job basically done now that his Tributes have been reaped, sits in a corner window seat, deeply engrossed in the latest edition of the Hunger Games escort manual. He's poring over rules like his life depends on it, occasionally breaking the silence with the sound of pencil scratches, taking notes on something he wants to bring up to the Gamemakers. Away from the platform for the Reaping, his stilted, crazed demeanor has given way to something more pompous and aloof. Ray can only assume that the actual escorting part of the escort job is considered beneath him.

Welsh, who he guesses is going to be his mentor for this whole ordeal, has been quiet, too, draining cup after cup of foul-smelling coffee to push through the effects of whatever he was drinking from his hip flask at the Reaping. Ray's familiar with this particular sober-up song and dance, and he decides that interrupting it with questions (like "hey, got any decent tips on not dying once I get there?") would not be in his best interests.

Frankie, who will have to be Irene's mentor by default, with the obvious conflict of interest and all, has been absent from their compartment. He hung around for a while when the train first got going- pacing and snarling and looking livid and generally annoying everybody- but he left to make a couple phone calls a while ago and hasn't returned. Probably trying to milk whatever connections he has in the Capitol, to see what can be done about his sister's reaping. Ray wishes him the best of luck with that.

Irene has been absent, too. Oh, she's sitting next to Ray at the dining table- she accepted her dinner with a proper thank you, poised as you please, and hasn't moved from the spot since. But everything she does is perfunctory, mechanical; she eats like a robot taking in fuel, like it no more matters that she's sitting at the most glorious table Ray's ever seen than it would if she was just eating tessera slop to get her belly from empty to full. She keeps cutting her food into uniform bites, with the right bits of silverware, going plate to mouth and back again on autopilot, and he'd bet good money that if he asked how she likes it, she wouldn't even know what it is to say something nice. It’s giving Ray a good, strong case of the creeps, and he wishes he could think of something to say to break her out of it. She’s acting like she’s dead already, and can only go through some recorded motions of what she used to do when she was alive.

For his part, Ray can only pick at the food. It’s delicious, and they keep bringing more of it than he even knew could exist in the world, but it’s pretty hard to eat when he’s sitting next to his girlfriend the ghost.

His girlfriend who is going to _be_ a ghost, if she stays like this in the arena.

He shouldn’t be thinking that, he knows. Hunger Games rules say that loyalty stops once your name comes out of the Reaping Balls, and he can still hear the echoes of Pop’s last words to him- _Make sure it’s you!_ \- ringing in his ears. His helplessness would be a-okay with everybody else. At this juncture, he’s supposed to have stopped caring about things like getting Irene to fight for her life.

Whoever came up with this system either wanted to make even the last arena-free days of the Tributes’ lives hell on earth, or they never loved someone like Irene Zuko.

Out of total desperation, Ray picks up one of the flat drink coasters off the table and wedges it between his thumb and forefinger, then tries to walk it across the back of his hand by flipping it from finger to finger. It’s a trick he saw someone on TV do with a coin once and has practiced with stray washer bolts in the past to amuse Irene. The coaster, emblazoned with the logo for the Games, is far too large for this sort of trick to work, and he ends up making a slight mess out of his plate just trying not to drop it. He grins at Irene, inviting her to see the (albeit quite pathetic) humor.

She manages a tiny ghost of a smile. _Yes, Ray, it’s very funny. So funny I almost forgot I was given a death sentence this morning._

He sighs and sits it back down on the table.

“You do magic tricks, kid?”

Ray looks up, startled. Welsh, still mainlining coffee at a speed that implies it’d be more efficient to just tap his veins and feed it to him in a tube, has been watching him from another table.

“Not really a magic trick,” Ray says. “Not a good one, anyway.”

Welsh just shrugs. “Whatever you can do that’ll charm an audience,” he says. “You can do that in the pre-Game interviews.”

He makes a face. “That include messing it up to get a laugh, sir?” The “sir” is unnecessary, and quite possibly sounds sarcastic, but it comes out before Ray can stop it. Welsh may be a broken shell of a human who looks more like a pudgy guy on the verge of middle age than a victor, but this close, there’s something about his presence that seems to demand respect. He wonders if that’s his survival instincts kicking in.

Welsh doesn’t seem to read it as sarcastic, though. He just gives him a small smile. “Whatever you can do.”

This, of all things, galvanizes Irene. She looks up from her food and gives Welsh a modicum of energy in her reply. “I thought the pre-Game interviews were for making yourself seem strong and unbeatable.”

Welsh chuckles. “Sure, for One and Two,” he says. “Would you buy that coming from you? I wouldn’t.”

Something defensive rouses itself in Ray’s chest. “What, you saying we look like weaklings?”

“I’m saying you look like you’re from Twelve, Vecchio,” he says. “Twelve’s not the horse the betting types like to back.”

Ray can’t really argue with that. All the same. “Irene’s got victor blood,” he reminds him. “Don’t they factor that in?”

“Irene is not my Tribute,” Welsh says. He gives a polite little salute in Irene’s general direction. “No offense, Miss Zuko.”

“None taken,” she says. The energy’s gone back out of her voice, though, and she’s turned her attention back to her plate.

Ray glares at Welsh. “Anyone ever tell you that just ‘cause something’s true doesn’t mean it ain’t offensive?” His survival instincts, it seems, only extend as long as it doesn’t get in the way of cheering up Irene.

Irene, not wanting to be cheered up, he guesses, gives him a look. “It’s fine, Ray.”

“No, it’s not,” he says. “There’s no rule that says a mentor can’t try to help both Tributes.”

This causes Moffat to pipe up from his rule book. “Yes, there is, Mr. Vecchio,” he says. “If two Tributes are _sharing_ a mentor, he or she is forbidden from displaying favoritism, but in cases such as yours, where each Tribute has their own, it is the duty of the mentor to--”

Ray gives him a sour look. “Who asked you?”

“I’ve got Frank on my side,” Irene says. “Let Welsh be on yours.”

As far as Ray’s concerned, having Frankie Zuko on your side is as good as having no one at all, sister or not. “It’s not about sides.”

Moffat chimes in again. “Yes, it is. You may wish to have Miss Zuko as your ally in the beginning of the Games- that’s your right- but before the event is over--”

“Inspectus, why don’t you focus on reading your rule book?” Welsh cuts him off. “I can handle my Tribute from here.”

Moffat makes a face as though he’s swallowing something very bitter. “All right, Harding, if you think that’s best.”

“Thank you,” Welsh says. He gets up from his table and walks down the aisle between the seats at a leisurely pace, like he hasn’t quite sobered up enough to keep all of his joints from going loose. He grabs a chair from another table, turns it backwards and sits in it next to Ray, blocking the aisle. 

Ray bristles a little- and isn’t that just him all over, freaking out over an offer of help just because it excludes Irene- and he fixes Welsh with another glare.

Welsh isn’t fazed. “You wanna back off that kinda look when we get there, kid,” he says. “It’s not gonna win you any friends.”

He nearly protests this. What friends does Welsh think he’s going to be able to make, considering? But he schools his expression into something more pleasant, anyway. Probably best not to alienate his only connection to the outside world.

Welsh looks him up and down. “Ever fought with anybody before?”

Ray imagines it won’t sound good if he admits to having mixed it up once or twice with Frankie (the look Irene is already giving him only adds to the feeling), so he gives an exaggerated, leisurely shrug. “Now and then.”

The skeptical look Welsh gives him sets him to bristling again. “How well do you hold your own?”

“I’m sitting here, aren’t I?” he snaps.

Welsh puts his hands up like he's surrendering. "Okay, okay." He shakes his head. "You better not be like this in individual assessments."

"I don't care about being assessed.”

"You should." This advice, surprisingly, does not come from Welsh, but from Irene.

Ray stares at her. "What, you want me to try to impress the Capitol types?"

"Yes." She doesn't qualify this with any kind of explanation, and it chills Ray to the bone. She can't spare any energy for her own sake, but she's already thinking about how he can win.

If she can tell he's bugged, she doesn't show it. She looks to Welsh and says, "He's okay in a fight, but he's good at backing off, too. And he's got a family counting on him."

Welsh nods. "I can probably spin that. They don't really do family out here. They'll think that's exotic."

"He takes tessera for his mom and his brother. Can you make it look noble?" she asks. She chuckles darkly at herself. "Do they _care_ about noble out here?"

"Sometimes," Welsh answers. "Doesn't always play too well."

Dizzily, Ray puts up his hands. "Whoa, whoa, whoa- what are you doing?"

"What am _I_ doing?" Irene looks at him incredulously. "You have to figure out your image for the press. That's how you get sponsors."

"Who says I want sponsors?" he asks.

Her incredulity only seems to grow. "Of course you want sponsors- you're going to need food and weapons and who knows what else."

"So will _you!_ " Ray resists the urge to tear his hair out. "Why are you talking me up when you haven't even decided, as far as I can tell, whether or not you're even gonna live?"

Irene pales dramatically, but- of all things- tries to cover. "You're going to share with me as long as you can, right?"

Ray doesn't buy it, and he's sure it shows in his face. "Yeah, but--"

"And I'm gonna share with you, whatever Frank gets for me," she says. "I'll do whatever he says. But you're walking around with a chip on your shoulder, and not even trying to help your case. So _I'm_ trying to help _you._ "

"And the fact that this is the first time you've woken up since the Reaping," Ray says, "I'm not supposed to read into that?"

"Frank's been on the phone since the Reaping," she says, looking prim and sharp, like a fancy lady hiding a giant dagger. One with which she's going to cut his throat if he doesn't straighten up and play right.

Ray becomes acutely aware, for the very first time, that Irene's been through all this before- Reaping drama, Games strategy, and the press tour. Whatever Welsh told Frankie when it was his turn, Irene knows about it, and can work with it.

It feels wrong.

"What happened to the Games being something nobody wants?" Ray asks.

Irene looks away. "Sometimes, you gotta make lemonade, Ray."

"That's the best you got?" he asks. "Seriously?"

When she looks back up at him, there's the tiniest hint of tears in her eyes. Like she would cry, if it was a luxury she could afford. His stomach gives a nervous, guilty twinge. "Yes," she says, fighting hard to keep her voice steady. "Yes, Ray. It's the best I got."

Guilt-ridden, he reaches over to grab her hand. She lets him, though she doesn't grab his back. "Irene--"

"Can we please just try to get through this?" she asks, and this time, she's starting to lose the fight. "Just- these last couple days we still have where it matters?"

Ray closes his eyes and lets his face drop against her hand on the table.

For a long moment, no one says anything.

Welsh clears his throat. "I'm guessing there's something more going on here than just being district partners."

Ray turns his head on the table to look at him. He doesn't know what face he's making exactly, but he'd guess it probably says, _Are you fucking blind?_

Irene answers for him. "He's been my boyfriend for a little bit."

Ray laughs. Sure. A little bit.

Welsh takes it in stride. "If you're not against it," he says, "I can sell that, too."

"Sell it?" The bitterness in Ray's voice is palpable even to him.

"Arena love stories go for a high premium," Welsh says. "If you can play it like it started in the Games. Act like you didn't know each other too well before that."

Ray can feel his expression contorting, like he's going to explode- how the hell is he supposed to act like that when Irene's been the only constant thing he's ever loved or wanted his entire life? When half of every damn childhood memory they're going to ask him about in the interviews begins, "This one time, Irene and me--"? When everyone they're going to ask at home will only be able to tell them the same thing?

Irene just nods. "We can do that."

"Since when?" he asks.

She gives him a quelling look. _Straighten up and play right._

"Fine," Ray says. "Sure. I'll just act like she's a stranger in the Capitol. That work for you?"

Welsh's answer surprises him. "Your ideas on this matter more than mine, kid. You're the one who's gotta spend what might be his last week on earth doing it. You tell me. Does it work for you?"

Irene looks down at him, pleading. Not just for his cooperation. She's pleading for her life.

A lump forms in Ray's throat that takes some effort to swallow. He slowly sits up. "You think it'd work that well?"

"If nobody else's story is better than yours," he says.

Ray wonders if anyone's will be. A boy and girl of close to the same age from the same community- there's a good chance they're not the only ones going into the arena with this kind of story. It's never occurred to him to wonder about that before.

He shakes it off. "Fine. I guess yeah."

Irene squeezes his hand on the table. The warmth of it feels to Ray like he's been given back a small shred of his sanity.

Welsh nods. "Okay," he says. "Before we do any more strategizing, you kids wanna see who you're up against?"

Ray can't think of a thing he's ever wanted to see less, but he nods anyway. "Sure. Let's go the whole hog."

Welsh looks over his shoulder and calls to Moffat, "Inspectus, you got the tapes?"

Moffat looks affronted, as if Welsh has just called into question every single one of his qualifications to do his job. "Of course I have," he says. "I've just been waiting for you to ask."

"Great," Welsh says, perfectly pleasant, like he doesn't even notice how huffy Moffat's gotten. "So let's review."

The tapes of the other eleven Reapings are about as unreassuring as Ray expected. One and Two have their usual contribution of total psychopaths. The girl from One- a brunette of about sixteen who could've been pretty if she weren't so damned terrifying- looks as hardened as if she's already survived three Games' worth of horrors, and will flinch over killing them about as much as she'd flinch over swatting a fly. The boy looks just as crazy, and thrilled to death about it. He's scarred and ugly, and going prematurely bald. (Ray wonders if it's natural, or some weird fashion in One. It's always been more like an extension of the Capitol than another district.)

The boy from Two, by contrast, gives Ray the willies by how _normal_ he looks, aside from his cold, unfeeling eyes. Like a shop window dummy that's been carefully programmed to seem as human as can be until you look too close. The girl at his side looks stiff and angry, her black hair cut in a severe bob around her earlobes that poofs at the ends. Her bangs look like they've been thinned with a razor. So does her smile.

The kids from Three- blond and skinny, like little gold rabbits- look unthreatening enough, but it's almost worse. The girl is pretty and delicate, and looks like she's about to faint dead away from shock and horror. The boy has a kind of puffed-up false bravado that's sickeningly easy for Ray to relate to.

Four is his first real surprise. Ray can't tell anything about them as people, really- other than the girl is seething and the boy is so polite he'd probably ask your permission before he tried to stab you- but what he can tell at a quick glance is that they aren't Careers. The boy has the fitness of one, but is so deeply uncomfortable, Ray can't even guess why he volunteered. The girl, by contrast, looks so wasted from lack of food or any kind of care that she seems like a good strong wind would blow her away.

"I told you they lost their school," Irene says.

"Yeah." Ray rubs the back of his neck. "I guess you were right."

Five's girl is unremarkable, but their boy makes Ray deeply uneasy. Five isn't a Career district, but the boy has the crazy, bite-your-face-off look of one. He even snaps his teeth at the cameras a few times, like he's planning to do just that. Ray hopes the Gamemakers get rid of him in the arena so that they won't have to. By the way Irene shudders and curls against his side during their appearance, he's guessing she hopes so, too.

Six, Seven, and Eight kind of go by before he can really absorb them- he thinks his brain might be shutting down and tuning it out on sheer survival instinct- but Nine brings him crashing back to earth. It's the little kids he noticed on the other boy's handheld during the Reaping. Both are the tiniest, most terrified-looking twelve-year-olds he's ever seen.

For these two, Irene lets out a horrified little gasp, and Ray decides to focus on comforting her rather than letting himself think about it. He doesn't know how long those two will have in the arena, but he wouldn't bet on it being more than a day.

Ten's pair are both dark-haired and close in age to Ray and Irene, though they aren't particularly impressive. The boy is in the process of trying to grow a scrubby goatee that makes him look affected. Ray hopes for his sake that one of the stylists makes him shave it off.

Eleven has another twelve-year-old: a small girl with jet black hair that's been woven into dozens of tiny, beaded braids. Her skin and eyes are dark as well, and Ray feels a little sick with himself for noticing that in a few years she no longer has, she’d have been stunningly pretty. The boy, darker than her and nearly twice her height, is at least Ray's age, perhaps a year or two older. Both of their expressions give him his first genuine smile since the Reaping. They look put-upon, like this was an expected inconvenience.

Before Welsh can stop the tapes, it continues on to the next, and last, in the show. The Reaping of Ray and Irene.

Ray tries to make himself look away before he can see Irene's name drawn again, but finds he can't. She looks just like a saint in one of his mother's stories, looking evil straight in the eye with bravery and incomparable grace. He holds the real girl sitting next to him a little tighter than before.

His own reaction on the tape is even more uncomfortable. Ray cringes to see himself lose his Goddamn mind for a whole twenty seconds before a Peacekeeper comes and escorts him, dazed and stupid-looking, up to the platform.

Welsh turns it off before it can get much further, and Moffat gives him a reproachful look. Ray gets the feeling he wanted to see how he looked on camera.

"Okay," he says. "What'd you learn?"

Neither of them seems able to muster a reply. Ray has gleaned little of practical value. Irene looks more upset than before.

Welsh gives a heavy sigh. "C'mon, you guys. What did you see?"

"Shouldn't we be waiting for Mr. Zuko to come back?" Moffat says with an injurious sniff. "Miss Zuko is, after all, his Tribute."

Welsh silences him with a sidelong look, and turns back to Ray and Irene, expectant.

"Nine's not going to make it, are they?" Irene finally says, in a quiet murmur that goes straight to Ray's heart. "They're so little."

Welsh's look takes a brief, sad turn. "Youngest victor on record is fourteen," he says. "So, no. They probably aren't."

Ray tries to find the bright side in this, just to get those looks off their faces. "We don't need to do anything about 'em," he says. "We can just stay away."

"We could try to..." Irene trails off.

Welsh shakes his head. "It's a tragedy, what's gonna happen to those kids. But it ain't your tragedy. There's nothing you can do about it. You'll get killed if you try."

Irene nods, biting her lower lip to stop its trembling.

Ray casts about for a subject change. "I don't think we got much to worry about from Four this year."

"Their mentor's pretty good," Welsh says. "I know her. She's not gonna let them go down without a fight. She'll teach 'em as much as she can before they have to go."

"Did you get a look at that guy?" Ray asks, skeptical. "Maybe she can work miracles, but if not, he's fried."

Reluctantly, Irene points out, "I think so, too. He looks too nice."

"He's still a pretty big guy," Welsh says. "And the arena has a way of burning 'nice' out of you real fast."

Ray fights down a feeling of squirming discomfort. In his mind, he can hear Pop shouting at him again. _Cut her loose._ He runs his hands through his hair and wonders how long it'll take before that starts sounding like a good idea. If the arena _could_ do that. Make him into something like that.

He clenches his teeth and looks at Welsh. "How'd you win your Games?" It comes out far more bitter and angry than he meant it to. He doesn't even care about the answer.

Welsh seems to have been expecting this. His response sounds too prepared. "I played it smart and got lucky," he says. "The arena my year killed more people than any of the Tributes. I just outlasted the others."

"Well, that's great," Ray says. "As long as we've got a deadlier location than usual, we should do fine."

"Ray," Irene says, but her voice sounds too tired to deliver it as reproachfully as she probably wanted.

"Location's an advantage," Welsh says. "With the right arena and the right sponsors, you can pull it off."

"You know anything about the arena this year?" Ray asks, folding his arms across his chest.

Welsh is starting to look as worn and battered as Irene. "No. That information's privileged. No one but the Gamemakers knows, and they keep a tight lid on it. But your stylist might be able to give you a clue from the uniform, if you don't alienate him right out of the gate."

"Would I do that?" His sarcasm is so dense, he can practically taste it.

"I dunno, kid," Welsh says. "You been trying since you got here." He scrubs a hand through his hair with a tired sigh and fixes Ray with a look. "So, my first piece of advice for you: stop it."

Ray can feel his temper flaring up like an allergy attack. Irene puts a hand on his arm to quiet him.

He takes a breath and tries. "'kay. Great." He leans back into the sofa. "Got any other tips for getting out of this?"

The transformation that occurs on Welsh's face and posture is so startling that Ray is almost sorry he asked. His shoulders droop while he leans backwards in his seat, like his whole body is going limp. His expression is careworn and exhausted, like he's been pushing a giant boulder up a mountain that no one has been able to see.

"Best advice there," he says quietly, "is that there _is_ no advice there."

Irene looks tormented, like she's heard this all before. Ray gets the feeling- not for the first time- that he's been plunged into the deep end, way over his head.

"What does that mean?" he asks.

Welsh sits up, lacing his fingers together in his lap, and looks... pitying. "No one ever gets out of this, kid. No one."

The sound of it is so final, Ray desperately wants to take it back. "I didn't--" He starts. Stops. Tries again. "I didn't mean out of the Games. Like- going back on the Reaping or something."

Welsh's look just doubles down on the pity.

"Neither did I."

\---

Ray sleeps badly that night. His dreams are a confused mess he only half-remembers, of winning a lottery where the prize is actually a basket full of venomous snakes. He thinks the snakes were eating each other when he woke up.

He doesn't remember where he is at first. The bed on the train is so warm and comfortable that he thinks for a brief, confused minute that sometime during the night, he finally died of cold or hunger (or maybe got bitten by a snake that crawled under the fence), and that he's woken up in his mother's Heaven.

Just when he's starting to panic over the possibility that he died in his sleep, he notices the sounds of the train's engine, and remembers where he is.

Suddenly, the idea of having died in his sleep doesn't seem so bad.

He lounges in bed for a good long time after he's clear on where he is, desperate not to have to face Welsh or Irene. (He's equally desperate not to have to put up with Frank or Moffat, though it takes longer for the thought of them to sink in.)

After a while, though, his stomach starts gurgling, and the need to eat as much as he can before he's in the arena and won't have food anymore motivates him to get up. After all, what good will he be to Irene out there if he gets a jump start on starving?

He dresses himself in the nicest outfit he can find in his compartment's closet- a suit of such quality that his Reaping suit looks dingy and old by comparison- and makes his way down the train to the dining car. Breakfast is already well under way.

So, unfortunately, is Frank's lecture to Irene about how to gut an opponent in their sleep.

"When did you ever gut anybody, Frankie?" Ray interrupts, which is about the closest they're ever gonna get to 'good morning.' "Way I remember it, your weapon of choice was a big fucking rock."

Frank's expression sours. "Screw you, Vecchio."

"Not in this lifetime," Ray says. He pulls up a seat next to Irene, who looks sick as a dog from her brother's advice, and can't seem to bring herself to touch her food. Ray rubs his hand up and down her back. "You okay?"

Irene startles, like she completely missed that he showed up and insulted her brother, and looks at him with a hollow smile. "Yeah. I'm fine." She starts cutting up her food in the same mechanical way she did yesterday.

Welsh tries to give a comforting look to both of them. "Don't worry about him," he says, inclining his head towards Frankie. "He's just repeating stuff he's heard from Muldoon, from Two."

Ray nods. He can't place the name, but the district is enough. Two is notorious for doing the craziest and grossest things in the arena. The Gamemakers try not to let them win about half the time, just because their antics don't play well on television.

Frankie doesn't look pleased about having this pointed out. "Muldoon won the murderer Quell," he points out. "Half the field, career criminals. If anyone knows anything about getting out of the arena in one piece--"

"It's us," Welsh cuts him off. "You didn't exactly do too shabby yourself, Frank."

Frankie looks put out, but mollified. Ray jolts a little as he realizes that Welsh was Frankie's mentor, back in the day, and is probably even more used to handling him than Irene is.

He's not sure whether this realization makes his opinion of Welsh go up or down.

Welsh shoots Irene a very gentle look. "Frank's good with sponsors," he says. "There's a good chance that you'll want for nothing out there, if the Games don't run too long. You might never even have to fight anybody at all."

Irene nods, but Ray can think of several reasons why this isn't comforting, starting with the fact that the Games often run for several weeks and can't be counted upon to be short, and ending somewhere around how impractical it can be to try to send in a parachute without alerting the more psychotic of the Careers to your Tribute's location. In the rare years that they've had both Frankie at his most charming, and a Tribute who's promising enough to draw in the rich betting crowd, sponsor gifts have proved to be just as much a burden as a blessing.

Ray decides it'd probably be upsetting to point this out in Irene's presence, though, so he shovels some food into his mouth before he damages her calm.

Unfortunately for him, Frank's here to throw tact to the winds. "Nobody gets out of the arena without fighting somebody," he says, with his typical oily, grating laugh that sets Ray's teeth on edge. "The Capitol doesn't want a victor who didn't get any victories. That's just sense."

Ray wonders if he'd get in trouble for strangling Frank on the train. Twelve's got two victors to choose from, and it'd probably be a real pain in the ass to try to get another boy Tribute after they've already had some press on him. He shakes his head and grasps Irene's hand. "Look, we run into anybody needing to be put down, I'll take care of it, okay?"

This statement just makes Irene go even paler, but before she can say anything, Frankie jumps in. "You planning to follow my sister around and mooch off her in the wilderness, Vecchio?"

Ray's grip on Irene's hand becomes so tight that he has to pry it off and grab the table's edge before he accidentally hurts her. "I'm planning to be with her until the bitter Goddamn end."

This was the wrong thing to say. Frank draws himself up to his full height in his chair, like a cat fluffing up its fur to loop he says. k twice as big. "Who asked you?" He shoots a look at Welsh, suspicious and surprisingly betrayed. "You tell him to do that?"

"I don't tell my Tributes to do much of anything they're not already planning to do," Welsh says, calm and even. "That ain't how I play it, Frank. You of all people should know."

Far from being reassured by this, Frankie's face darkens to a violent shade of purplish-red. He grabs a knife off the breakfast table and lunges for Ray, trying to grab him by his tie.

Ray drops sideways to the floor to dodge him, then rolls back so he's standing behind Irene. Frank, rather than try to go around Welsh to get to the right side of the table, climbs up on the table itself so he can jump on Ray in the aisle.

"Frank!" Irene screams, launching herself at her brother's back and trying to wrestle him away. "Stop it! You'll kill him!"

Frank shoves her off with an elbow to her chest, and Welsh has to get up to catch her before she hits the floor. Ray clenches his teeth and takes a swing for Frankie's face, which connects with his cheekbone and knocks him back, but gets him a good-sized cut on the arm for the trouble.

Ray clutches his bleeding arm while he drags himself to his feet. Frank pulls himself up and holds the knife out, threatening.

"Frank, stop it!" Irene gasps out, clutching her chest where he got her.

Frank glares at Ray over the blade of his knife. "Let's get something straight, Vecchio," he says. "Nobody- _nobody_ , not you or anyone else- is gonna touch my sister out there."

That's rich, coming from the guy who just knocked Irene down like she was nothing, but Ray doesn't say so. "Funny. That's just what I was thinking."

Frank spits a mouthful of blood on the floor. His cheek must've been cut on his own teeth when Ray hit him. "Yeah, well, think this. She's the one coming home, not you. You're floating home in a body bag. No one's gonna remember your fucking name after the Games are over." He spits again. "You aren't a player. You're already dead."

"God, Frank, just shut up."

Ray and Frankie both turn around. Irene is standing, white-faced and livid, with Welsh's arm around her shoulders. Her chest is purpling up in a bruise that seems to accuse both of them. Her eyes are sparkling with more unshed tears.

"You're just making everything worse," she says, her voice trembling. "Don't you see that?"

For the first time in Ray's memory, Frankie looks guilt-ridden. "Irene," he tries.

"You're not doing any of this for me," she says. "You're doing it for _you._ To make yourself feel better." Her mouth twists up, like she's trying to hold back hysterical screams. "You do whatever you got to do when you get home, but if you really want to make me feel better, you'll just... back off and let us get through this until we can't anymore."

Frankie's hand with the knife is trembling.

"She's right, Frank," Welsh murmurs quietly. "It's their lives. Let 'em do what they got to do."

Ray watches the color recede from Frank's face, until he's left with a sickly, mottled grey. He puts the knife back down on the table.

Irene takes this as her cue to break away from Welsh, running down the car until she can let herself out of the compartment.

No one seems to know what to say.

Frank grabs a handful of ice from the bucket on the table, wraps it up in one of the pretty white linen napkins, and holds it to his cheek. The hatred for Ray in his expression is practically a living thing all its own, but it seems to have taken a much worse beating than Ray himself could've ever delivered.

Welsh wraps a fatherly-looking arm around Frankie's shoulders and guides him back to his seat. "Why don't you go check on her, kid?" he suggests, examining Frankie's bruise. If Frankie wants to protest this, it doesn't show; he looks too ashamed to try.

Ray swallows and nods. "Yeah, okay." Gingerly, he corners around the pair of them to follow Irene's path out of the car.

He has to search for a while to find her. She hasn't returned to her sleeping car, or even locked herself in his, nor is she in either of the gigantic, luxurious-looking bathrooms.

When he does find her, she's curled up in the last row of the viewing car, leaning against one of the windows, watching the wilds of the out-districts slip by. To his relief, she isn't crying. She just looks small and numb.

Ray makes his way down the aisle and slides in next to her. "Hey there."

"Hey," she says. Her voice has gone back to sounding hollow and far away.

"I'm sorry about all that," he says. "Me and Frankie- it was out of line."

She lets out a startling laugh. "What are you sorry for?" she asks. "He started it." She hugs her knees, shaking her head. "He always starts it."

Ray cringes. It's true- neither Ray nor anyone else has ever had a fight with Frank Zuko where Frank didn't spit out the first taunt or throw the first punch. But Irene's never acknowledged it before. She's always been too invested in continuing to love her brother and believe he's a decent but misunderstood person, despite any evidence to the contrary. Any other day back in District Twelve, it'd feel like a little bit of a victory. Out here, it feels like Irene's already letting go.

"Yeah, well," he says. "I oughta know better. So I'm sorry."

Irene shrugs.

Ray bites his lip and tries wrapping a comforting arm around her shoulders. He tries to take it as a win that she curls up against him instead of trying to pull away.

Any delusions there are wiped out pretty quickly by her reply. "I can't get it out of my head, Ray."

"Get what out of your head?"

"This," she says. "All of this. The Games, the strategies. Watching videos and trying to figure out from them who's gonna live and who's gonna die."

"That's just the Hunger Games," he says. "Everybody does it."

She sighs. "I know that, Ray. It's still terrible."

He's got nothing for that. He tries cuddling her closer.

"Those kids from Nine," she whispers. "And that little girl from Eleven. They're all just babies."

Ray winces and rubs her shoulder. "I know."

"And the boy from Four looks nice," she continues. "And the ones from Three- they look like us."

"Last I checked, we weren't that blond, babe," he tries to joke.

Irene's not in the mood to joke. "They're our age. And they were scared. They looked- they looked _normal_ , Ray. Like maybe they'd be our friends if they were from Twelve."

"They're not, though."

"But they could've been," she insists. "And- Six, Seven, Eight, Ten. They all look like normal people we could go to school with."

"But we don't," Ray says. "Irene, you can't go in there thinking like that. You can't--"

"Put a human face on them?" she asks. Her tone is cutting. Almost angry.

Ray tries to muster some gentleness. "You can't think of what coulda been."

"But that's the whole point of the Games," Irene says. "To make everybody think of what could've been, if they weren't sending us in there to die." She hugs her knees tighter. "If the other twenty-three of us were allowed to live."

"But that's not your fault," he says. "It's not your fault and it's not my fault. It's just the way it is. Why are you feeling guilty before we're even in there?"

"Because this is probably the last chance to feel guilty I'm gonna get."

Ray shakes his head. "Babe, that doesn't make any sense."

"Yes, it does," she says. "Once we're in there, we're gonna want to live bad enough to do- anything. To- to gut people in their sleep, or bash little kids' heads in with rocks. That's what happens. That's what _always_ happens. And- everybody, Frank and Welsh and Moffat and even _you_ are already pushing me to embrace it. To think and talk about how I'm gonna do it. Like it doesn't even matter that that's never been who I am. Like who I am doesn't matter." She covers her face with her hands. "Like I'm already just one of twenty-three."

"You're not gonna be just one in twenty-three," Ray says. "You're gonna go home. Everybody's bugging you to embrace it because they want to you to be one of _one_ and go home when it's over!"

"Even you?" she asks, lifting her head from her hands to give him a sharp look that's so knowing, it scares him.

Ray swallows. He's been trying hard not to think about that. About what it would mean for him if Irene was the one to put this in the bag.

He doesn't want to die.

 

_Cut her loose._

 

He shakes his head. Tries to focus on something else that's true. "I want you to live," he says. "I need you to be alive."

"I need you to be alive, too," she says. She rubs her eyes. "But only one of us can get that wish."

"Yeah, well," he says. He has nothing to finish the sentence off with.

They sit for a while in miserable silence. Ray keeps his arm around her. Irene keeps her gaze fixed on the window.

_We're gonna want to live bad enough to do anything,_ he repeats to himself. He knows she's right. He's seen kids make friends in the arena, just long enough to make it close to the end and kill each other. Kids from the lower districts usually snap under the pressure, slaughter each other for food, for a blanket, for a tiny mistake that causes a blowout way out of proportion. Everybody always gossips about those ones after. The district people look down on it, like they should've been better than that, while the Capitol eats it up like a really choice dessert.

Ray's never had to think about what if it was him before.

Could that happen? Could he do that? Could he get so hungry, so cold, so desperate to go home that he just... grabs Irene and ends it? Could Irene do that to him?

Would he try to stop her?

Would he succeed if he did?

Ray shoves the questions away as hard as he can. There's no rule that says he has to think about that now- start making decisions and let them twist him up in knots before he even gets there. Odds are good that this is his last week on earth. Who says he has to spend it letting them make him into whatever the hell it is they want from their victors?

Someone bigger and stronger with no qualms about this whole thing will probably make the decision before he can, anyway.

He's still determinedly not-thinking about this when he feels Irene go stiff in his arms. She lets out a little gasp.

"What's the matter?" he asks. He nearly amends it to, _What **else** is the matter?_

Irene grabs his chin and turns his head to towards the window. "Look," she says.

Rising up out of the horizon, like some kind of castle in a fairytale, is a shiny building, taller than anything he's ever seen, made of glass and metal, glowing in the light of the early morning sun.

The Training Center.

Irene stares at it with a strange kind of awe. Overwhelmed. Like she can't believe what's she's seeing.

Ray swallows hard and confirms it for her. "We're here."


	10. Chapter 10

As the train draws closer, the Capitol seems to rise out of the ground. The first thing Victoria sees is the Training Center- as familiar a landmark to her from previous Games as her own white oak tree. From what she can tell, it's the tallest building in the whole city.

The whole place is a riot of color: gleaming silver, dusky red, pinks and yellows and blues so brilliant they could never exist in nature. The presidential mansion is a white so bright, it puts District Four's snow to shame.

What strikes her hardest is that there's so much light. Even in the daytime, there are lights blinking and glowing everywhere- in shop windows, giant boards flashing advertisements, on little lamps in the street that the multitude of cars seem to be following. How much must it cost them all to run this much electricity? Even the merchants back home couldn't afford this much light.

_It's very pretty,_ she thinks, _in a dizzying sort of way._ It's also a colossal waste.

"They're certainly... industrious here, aren't they?" Fraser asks, looking dazed.

"Magical," she agrees, before she remembers that she had vowed to stop speaking to him.

Thatcher, for her part, looks underwhelmed. Victoria guesses she must have gotten used to the Capitol in her last trips here. "I'm afraid that neither of you is going to get much of a look at it," she says, eyes trained on an itinerary in her hands. "We'll be heading straight for the Remake Center for prep, and from there to the parade by the President's mansion. Then to the Training Center for some supper before you go to bed."

Victoria feels a brief stab of disappointment. She can't buy anything in all those crazy shops she can see from here, but it would have been nice to get a closer look at them.

"Ma'am?"

Thatcher sighs. "Yes, Fraser?"

"Would you mind giving us an overview of what will happen in- prep?" Fraser says this as if the word is in a foreign language he's only on passing familiarity with.

Thatcher frowns at him. "Fraser, surely you've _seen_ the Hunger Games before?"

"Oh, yes, ma'am," he says. "The mandatory viewing hours, of course."

Ah. That explains it. Thatcher looks peeved. "With all due respect to your father, he didn't do you any favors by not watching the pre-Games coverage with you."

"We didn't own our own television, ma'am," he says, a little stiffly.

She sighs again. "Your appearances will be cleaned up and tailored so as to be suitable for an appearance on a national broadcast. You will both be bathed, shaved, manicured, pedicured, denticured, and--" She shoots a disapproving glance at Victoria's hair. "--groomed." She looks at her itinerary again. "Then made up and costumed for the parade. You _have_ seen the parade?"

"In photographs, yes," Fraser says. Victoria covers her mouth to hide her amused smile. He looks as though he doesn't approve.

Some concern manages to creep past Thatcher's annoyance. "Our stylist this year is Katherine Burns," she says. "She's a rather talented hair and clothing designer, and our victors have been trying to woo her away from District One for the past two years. She is... rather young. But very, very talented. A prodigy, in fact."

Victoria doesn't like the look on Thatcher's face. "Is that all we should know?"

"It's certainly what you ought to keep in mind," Thatcher says.

Fraser frowns. "Is she in some way unfriendly?"

Thatcher snorts. "She's very friendly," she says. The concern creeps back into her expression again, and she admits, "She is, however... somewhat overwhelming. In a manner that is very typical of Capitolites, as you'll soon find out."

Victoria imagines having her hair cut by a blowhard politician, explaining to her in damning detail how much she deserves to be here, paying for the sins of her ancestors.

Thatcher gives them both a stern look. "Listen to me very carefully. You must, no matter how awkward it is, cooperate with her and obey her orders to the letter. The parade is the first step in impressing your potential sponsors, and all of her efforts will be geared towards facilitating your future good fortune. She is on your team. She is here to help you. You will be compliant, and above all, _grateful._ Am I understood?"

"Yes, ma'am," Fraser says. He looks as alarmed as Victoria feels.

Once they disembark from the train, they're rushed into another car- this one long, sleek, and completely black, with the Games' logo pasted on each tinted window. The inside is both dark and cold, like they've been transported into an artificial night.

The car winds its way through the Capitol streets at what feels to her like a breakneck speed, zipping around everything she might want to look at out the window so fast that she can't get her bearings. She wonders if they're afraid that she'll somehow figure out how to navigate the streets and make a run for it.

The Remake Center, when they arrive, is surprisingly nondescript. Where most buildings in the Capitol stretch up into the sky, this one sprawls out on the ground, like a house in District Four afraid of collapsing under its own weight in the snow. It's constructed out of a plain grey stone that lacks any of the ornamentation of the other buildings- no lights, no signs, and remarkably few windows. It looks more to Victoria like a prison than even the Training Center did when they passed it on the train.

The car zips down a long hill that goes under the Remake Center into a sort of loading dock, where Victoria can see other cars pulling in. She realizes these must be bearing the other Tributes, and tries to get a look, but she and Fraser are ushered away before she can see anyone else.

When they get inside, their stylist is already waiting for them.

Victoria's never seen a proper Capitolite in person before, save for the escort, but she's always assumed that the escorts and the people on TV dress the way they do _because_ they'll appear on a broadcast. It turns out that's wrong.

Katherine Burns looks to be all of nineteen, but that is one of the few qualities about her Victoria can identify as human. Her round face is caked with make-up in a pale, sickly green, with metallic gold tattoos of fractals framing her eyes and on her cheeks. Her dress is a forest green chiton made of some rich fabric Victoria can't identify, adorned with gold on the hem and neckline that matches her tattoos. Because it's sleeveless and low-necked, with the skirt hemmed high on her calves in the front, she can see that the skin of Katherine's entire body has been done up the same as her face. Her bright blonde hair is as short as Thatcher's, but as curly as Victoria's own, so it puffs out from her head as though she's been electrocuted. The overall effect makes her look like some very rare and exotic humanoid flower.

Victoria hopes like hell that she doesn't intend to do the same thing to her.

"Meeeeeeeg!" Katherine sings out at the top of her lungs, leaping on Thatcher and kissing her cheeks while Thatcher looks stiff and embarrassed. "Oh, it's so wonderful to see you! How've you been keeping since last year's Games?" She doesn't wait for an answer. "I've been so busy ever since I signed on to be part of Team Four. I have spent _months_ in aquariums and fish markets and reading the positively _dullest_ history books trying to find inspiration on the _spirit_ of Four. Ultimately, I found my ideas in a book of pre-Catastrophe fairytales! Can you imagine? Had to get a special dispensation from the Gamemakers to even be able to look at it! Isn't that silly?"

Thatcher takes advantage of Katherine having to stop to breathe to introduce them. "That sounds like a very strong effort. I look forward to seeing it. I'd like you to meet our Tributes- this is Victoria, and--"

Katherine looks horrified. "Oh, no, no, no, darling!" She grasps Victoria's face between her hands- on which she seems to be wearing about twenty rings, now all simultaneously digging into her cheeks. "You're so pale! And so skinny! And your hair! Oh, this won't do at all- no, no, no."

Victoria isn't sure whether to be insulted or hopeful. "Are you going to have to send me back?"

Thatcher glares at her, though Katherine doesn't notice. "You looked so much taller on television. I'm going to have to alter your dress!" She lets go of Victoria's face and turns towards a beleaguered-looking assistant. "Perry!"

Perry has already removed an ornate gold pillbox from the enormous handbag he's carrying to give Katherine some small medication that's round as a marble and blue as a robin's egg. Katherine dry-swallows it and then turns towards them again. As maniacal and hyperactive as she looked before, she looks even worse with the pill in her system. "Oh, my goodness, so much work to do- I'll have to take in the dress, and adjust the color palette of your make-up, and oh, I'll have to do something about your hair--"

"You can cut it off," Victoria says, glancing at Thatcher's pixie cut. "I don't mind." More accurately, it sounds preferable to her, compared to trying to get the mats out.

Katherine's horror returns. "No! Absolutely not! I'm sure that we can take care of this. A girl Tribute has to look like a girl- you don't want to be sent all the wrong things in the arena, do you?"

Victoria can't think of a single thing sponsors could send her in the arena that would be more useful to a girl than a boy, but opts not to say so. "No, really, I--"

"No, no, no. We can sort this right out." Katherine's already pawing at her hair to tug out the elastic she's tied it off with and Victoria tries not to shriek at the painful handling when Katherine's rings snag on it twice.

Katherine extracts her rings and looks at Victoria like a mountain she's determined to climb. "We'll need a plate with the highest setting, Perry."

Her assistant nods and pulls something else out of the enormous handbag.

Victoria doesn't even get time to ask what it is before they're shocking her with it, so that her hair stands up on end.

"There's a start," Katherine says. "Now let's see- what else can I--"

"I do have two Tributes, Katherine," Thatcher reminds her patiently.

"Oh, yes, of course, you do, don't you?" Katherine turns to Fraser so quickly that Victoria feels dizzy and Fraser looks like he's just been pushed in front of one of those Capitol cars.

"You, at least, are exactly as tall as you looked in the broadcast!" Katherine says, with a tone like this was very considerate of him.

"Thank y--" Fraser starts to say.

"Though I'm afraid you also looked a little more colorful on television than you do in person. I'm afraid I'll have to do something about your complexion. Is there no sun out there in District Four? You have all the fish, I'd assumed you'd have beaches, but you look as though you've lived in a basement all your life."

Fraser looks trapped. "Well, it's actually quite cold out--"

"Never mind. At least you've got good shoulders. I love a man with proper shoulders, and so does everyone here. They're the 'in' thing this year. Probably because of that big gorilla from Eight who won last year- Toe Blake. He's mentoring this year. Have you met him?"

"No, I'm afraid I--"

"Oh, now, that's just laziness. You should be getting to know all of the mentors this year, not just yours. How on Earth can you know if you want to win if you don't know all of the people you'll have to be friends with after? All of the victors have to be friends, it's practically written down in the rules! And you've just been lounging about, not meeting anyone?"

"I've only just gotten off the train, ma'am," Fraser says, helpless.

Victoria feels a little bad for wanting to laugh.

Katherine keeps up her chatter at a constant clip as she leads them down to the prep rooms. She doesn't seem to notice that none of them are responding to her, not even Perry, her poor assistant, who seems to exist solely for the purpose of carrying her bag and dispensing her little blue pills whenever she realizes another challenging aspect of getting them ready for the parade. Each one makes her talk louder and faster, until the only words coming out of her mouth that Victoria can even understand are colors and metals. She assumes Katherine's attempting to describe their parade costumes to them.

The inside of the Remake Center is as blank and foreboding as the outside, with blue-tinged lighting that makes everything look washed out and ghostly. The whole place smells to Victoria like medicine, and whenever they pass an open door, she can see crews fogging the rooms with disinfectant, as if they're in a hospital.

The hallways are labyrinthine and seem to go on forever, and Victoria has to wonder how the hell the people who have to work here are able to find their way. Katherine seems to have the path memorized, though, and her jaunty, high-heeled sprint is the only thing harder to keep up with than her chattering. Even Fraser and Thatcher look winded the first time she stops because she spots a group of people she wants to squeak at.

The group that Katherine stops for look as outlandish and inhuman as she does, and for a moment, Victoria doesn't take any real note of their individual characteristics. But then Katherine warbles out, "Maaackeeeeenzieeee!", and she jerks sharply to attention.

"Katherine!" the tallest one calls back, and she stops to allow herself to receive a few air kisses on each cheek.

In person, Mackenzie King is as ridiculous as she is on television. Her dark brown hair is shellacked into the shape of a fan of different-sized hearts, and each heart is dyed a different color- bright red, midnight blue, and emerald green. Her eyebrows are dyed to match- each one tri-color in a neat little row- while her eyelashes are false and thick with glitter. By contrast, her pale pink suit is so normal, it almost gives Victoria a headache to see the two side by side in person. She is probably the most ridiculous-looking person Victoria has seen in the Capitol.

She is also, without question, the most famous.

Katherine is chattering at her about her designs so fast that it's impossible to understand a word. Luckily for Mackenzie, she doesn't appear to be remotely interested in what Katherine has to say.

"Are these the District Four Tributes?" she asks, breezing completely by their stylist to look hungrily at Fraser and Victoria. The question seems to be directed at Thatcher, who has straightened her posture out respectfully.

"Yes," she says. "My first. They volunteered."

"Well, isn't that nice," Mackenzie says, not bothering to sound very sincere. Victoria can feel her eyes picking them apart for potential story, and the feeling is uncomfortable enough that she crosses her arms over her chest a little protectively. It feels a little like being appraised for deliciousness at a banquet.

"I was so sorry," Mackenzie says, shaking each of their hands in turn, and still holding back on anything resembling sincerity, "to hear about what happened to your school."

"Thank you," Fraser says. "Though I'm afraid neither of us attended."

Mackenzie waves this away. "It was still in your district. You must've lost friends."

"No," he says. "I didn't know any of the students who went there."

Mackenzie looks disappointed by this, and Thatcher glares at the back of Fraser's head before interjecting, "His father was the Peacekeeper who was killed attempting to evacuate the facility. He was able to pull out four students before succumbing to his injuries."

"Five," Victoria corrects.

Mackenzie's hungry look is back. "So your father was originally from the Capitol."

"His parents were," Fraser allows.

She turns that hungry look on Victoria, so quickly that Victoria finds herself falling a step or two backwards to get away from it. "And you're- a family friend? Or just an admirer?"

"She was also part of the rescue effort." To Victoria's surprise, this answer is supplied by Fraser instead of Thatcher. "She coordinated my father's climb over the wall."

Mackenzie pulls a small notebook from her pocket and begins writing things down. "Now _that_ is interesting," she says. She looks back up at them. "Would you spell your name for me?"

Fraser looks no less harried by this than he had been by Katherine, but he complies. "B-E-N-T-O--"

Mackenzie King is only half listening. "You're going to be a very interesting subject, Bento."

"Ben _ton_ ," he corrects, a little miffed.

"Mm-hmm." Mackenzie looks to her.

Victoria opts not to risk acquiring a nickname. "Victoria."

Mackenzie laughs, writing it down. "Oh, that's just beautiful," she says. "I can get a lot of fantastic soundbytes out of that. You'll probably end up with a million fans just on the name alone. And the hero reputation- that'll sound great."

"Thank you." Mackenzie hasn't sounded sincere so far, why should Victoria?

Katherine looks irked that she's being ignored in favor of the Tributes. "Did you want something, Mackenzie? Usually, you don't talk to the Tributes before the pre-Games interviews, I find it very hard to believe you're down here collecting material for your show already, isn't there something else that you might be--"

Mackenzie, it seems, is important enough to talk over a stylist. "Yes, I'm down here with a crew to get a look at the designs for the parade this year, in case we need any filler material for the slow parts of the Games' broadcast."

Katherine looks even less happy about having her work viewed as "filler material."

Mackenzie doesn't notice. "Why don't you show me what you've got lined up?"

"Of course," Katherine says, smiling in a way that suggests she's trying not to leap on top of her and bite her throat out. "Margaret, you know the rest of the way to the prep rooms, don't you? I can catch up with you up there after they're cleaned up. If not, though, I can film Ms. King's material with her later. I would hate to leave you and the children to get lost--"

"Oh, they won't get lost," Mackenzie says. "The Ice Queen has a compass' sense of direction."

Thatcher looks ill-pleased by having her moniker from her Games repeated to her face, but she nods. "I can take it from here, Katherine. Why don't you take this chance to showcase your label?"

Katherine nods. "Oh, thank you. I've got my comm on if you need anything, of course. Just have one of the preps upstairs beep me if you need. I'll be right there in a jiffy. I'm sure that they know how to work the--"

"I'm sure they do," Thatcher says, putting a hand on each of their shoulders and corralling them down the hallway.

"It was nice to meet you, Victoria, Bento!" Mackenzie calls after them.

"Ben _ton_ ," Fraser calls back as they're led away.

"That was Mackenzie King," Thatcher says, as if they don't know. "She'll be interviewing all of the Tributes before the Games."

Victoria wants to jump in with something defensive, remind her that she's been subject to mandatory viewing the same as everyone else, no matter how wild and untended she looks, but Fraser gets there first. "Of course," he says. "I remember seeing your interview with her before your Games. She's quite effusive."

Thatcher looks momentarily caught off-guard, for which Victoria doesn't blame her. It's the first thing Fraser's said that implies any normal experience with the Games, rather than reacting like they're a barbaric custom in a foreign country that he's been checking out of since the Reaping. It lasts for maybe a tenth of a second before Thatcher's lips thin like she's keeping her temper in check. "Wonderful," she says. "Those interviews are very important to setting the tone for how the Gamemakers treat you in the arena, and how many sponsors I'll be able to procure for the pair of you. So if you could do me a rather large favor, Fraser, try not to say anything overtly illegal when you talk to her."

If this offends him, he doesn't show it. Fraser just nods and says, "Yes, ma'am."

When they arrive upstairs, the feeling of being served up as a meal intensifies. The second Thatcher steps out to let them work, Victoria's prep team goes to work on her with such a vengeance, it’s like she's being torn apart like a prized game hen to be served to the president at a banquet. Her eyebrows are plucked and shaped with tiny electrified tweezers, her arms, legs, thighs, and underarms ripped bald with strips of linen dipped in hot wax. 

Contrary to Katherine's wishes that her hair not to be cut, the preps scissor off a good three or four inches before submerging it in some vaguely floral-scented goop that feels disgusting, but puts a lot of softness and shine back into her curls. The curls themselves have sprung back into tight-coiled ringlets, a shape she hasn't seen them in since her mother used to roll them up with paper the night before the Reaping when she was very young.

There's a brief argument between the preps that Victoria can't follow about what they're going to do with her body. For a moment, horrible visions dance through her head of them conducting extensive surgeries on her to reduce the size of her nose, or increase the size of her eyes, or perhaps tuck in her ribs or hips to get rid of whatever semblance of curves she might have.

The visions aren't terribly far off. Sharp needles are stabbed straight into her breasts to introduce some hormone or other that fills them out more over the hours they spend tending to the rest of her, while another person is brought in to examine her teeth. Three end up being pulled and replaced with shiny new porcelain-looking ones before the rest are scraped and bleached to match. A few are dremeled to what the preps consider a more appealing shape. She gets through it all with the aid of the Capitol's incredible.painkillers, though nothing can quite erase the horror of watching each of her bloody, mangled teeth passing by her face as they're ripped out and discarded.

Her hands, feet, elbows, knees, and nearly her entire back are scoured with rough stones before her body is soaked in the same sort of goop they washed her hair with. Victoria can't deny that it makes her skin as soft as a newborn's, but she hates it anyway. She feels like a turtle that's had its shell peeled off. Naked. Defenseless.

Katherine and Thatcher return around the time that Victoria's starting to despair of ever getting away from the preps and their innovative torture devices. Thatcher nods approvingly, satisfied that she's cleaned up enough for the cameras, but Katherine seems to be transported with joy.

"Why, look at you!" She takes one of Victoria's hands and holds it above her head to twirl her. "See, Meg? Didn't I tell you there was a beautiful girl somewhere under all that dirt? She could almost pass for a civilized person! Oh, it's perfect, just perfect! It's almost a shame to cover it all up with clothes!"

"Oh, don't worry," one of the preps puts in. "We got the whole thing on film. It'll be on the completed Games set when it goes up for sale."

For the first time, Victoria finds herself grateful that she no longer has a family to humiliate. Her father would have died if film of her naked body being sanded and varnished like a freighter with a bad case of rust had been broadcast and sold during his lifetime.

This doesn't occur to Katherine, of course, who simply lets out a delighted "ooh" before turning back to Victoria with a beaming smile. "Well! Since their work isn't going entirely to waste, you should be ready now to see mine! Oh, just wait until you see it, you'll faint dead away! I have truly outdone myself this year--"

Victoria tunes out her mile-a-minute chatter to a dull murmur and follows her and Thatcher to her dressing room. (If she had been excited about this part to begin with, that excitement would be severely hampered by the fact that the preps are following along, too. They're not done with her yet.)

Fraser is already in the dressing room when they arrive, trailed by his own prep team and looking as if he's been given much the same treatment that she has. He's wrapped in a steel-grey robe that matches her own, and looks even more agonized than she does to be wearing so close to nothing, in front of so many people. Victoria finds this fascinating. She's never met a boy with standards of modesty before.

"Smile, you two!" Katherine urges in a warbly singsong that grates Victoria's ears. Then she thinks the better of it. "Or don't! Just stand back and let my work transport you!"

Fraser looks as though he's trying to avoid showing how skeptical he is about the possibility of being transported, and Victoria suspects that her own expression has slipped back into the cool, impassive mask that has more or less been her default since the fire. If Katherine's hoping to transport them to fashion nirvana, she's got her work cut out for her.

Someone- Victoria guesses Thatcher- has taken District Four standards of what's appropriate to do in mixed company into consideration just enough to have a screen brought in and pushed between her and Fraser before they're both stripped again. Victoria's naked and fidgeting when Katherine's work is rolled in on a clothing dummy.

The dress Katherine has made for her is not _quite_ fashion nirvana. But, Victoria's forced to admit, if it was for any purpose but this one, it would have been.

The dress is a brilliant aquamarine, and resembles a full-fledged ball gown. It's completely strapless and clings to her body all the way down to her knees (Victoria notices that some padding has been added to the hips to make her look a little fuller in that department), where it flares out to the sides, like a fish's tail fin. The bodice's neckline is heart-shaped, to emphasize her new cleavage, and studded with glittering gems in a pattern evocative of a small school of fish.

She's barely zipped into it before the preps are on her again, one working painfully at her hair and two more covering her in make-up. From what she can see in the mirror as they work, they're painting her eyes in glittery blue and green in a pattern like fins, and her arms, neck, and shoulders in a pattern like scales. The hairdresser behind her has divided her hair into layers, with a braid running down the center while strands of her hair are woven into each side of it in a way that puts her in mind of a cage for the rest of it. Katherine informs her halfway through that this pattern is called a mermaid braid- and Fraser has to pipe up from his side of the screen that a mermaid is a half-fish, half woman sea creature of ancient myth when this clears up nothing for her. Victoria tries not to resent the fact that Katherine has inadvertently cast her in the role of edible prey.

When they finish her makeup and hair, the preps move to her sides to slide a pair of bracelets on her wrists. These are silver, fitted perfectly to her bony wrists in a way that camouflages them a bit, and have a series of chain links that are designed in the shape of either fish scales or a fishnet (Victoria isn't entirely sure) that dangles partway down the back of her hand. A thin chain stretches from the end of each mesh to her middle finger, where they're connected to rings of the same chainlink pattern that are slipped onto her fingers.

Katherine is almost teary-eyed over the effect. "Look how perfect you are," she says, beaming at Victoria's reflection in the mirror. She looks around the edge of the screen and smiles bigger. "Look how perfect both of you are!"

Fraser lets himself be pulled to her side, so that they're standing shoulder-to-shoulder in the mirror.

Fraser's costume is decidedly less formal than hers. Katherine has wrapped him in an ecru mock-up of a fishnet, wrapped over one shoulder and around his waist in a sort of toga fashion, with half of his chest on display. (His preps have rubbed him down with some aromatic oil that makes him shine like he's covered in a thin patina of sweat. Victoria supposes that, to the Capitol's pampered and lazy crowd, sweat must look very exotic and masculine.) Around his neck is a painful-looking necklet that seems to have been made out of fish hooks bent and looped together, fitting close enough against his skin that it just rests against the hollow of his throat. His hair (which is apparently impossible to coax from its neatly-combed side part) is crowned with a gold and silver circlet, twisted around itself in the shape of silver waves being swam in by little golden fish. He's even been given his own share of makeup: black stylized fish hooks painted off the corners of each eye, down to his cheekbones. The same fish hooks have been writ large on his arms, stretching from each shoulder down almost all the way to each elbow. 

"You look tougher than me," Victoria says, trying to keep the dismay from her voice.

"You look absolutely stunning," he counters, giving her a small, kind smile.

"You both will capture the attention of potential sponsors," Thatcher says, "which is rather the point of the thing anyway."

Katherine looks put out that no one seems to be drooling over her work, but seems to have developed enough tact not to try to pry compliments out of them. "Well," she says with a tight smile, "I guess we'll see how the crowd reacts, then." Since she seems to be required by law to say something to boost her own ego, she adds, "I'm sure they'll all be delighted with what I've done."

Fraser, at least, has something resembling good breeding, and he bows his head to her. "We appreciate your efforts very much, Miss Burns."

"Yes," Victoria agrees, not overly concerned about whether or not she sounds all that sincere. "Thanks."

Even this pathetic gratitude is enough for Katherine to hug both of them so hard their heads bang together. "I'll be sure to tell all of my friends that their sponsorship donations would be best spent on District Four!"

"Thanks," Victoria says again. She supposes it would be ungracious of her to point out that, as the District Four stylist, Katherine probably would have been telling all of her friends that, anyway.

"Come on," Thatcher says, looking at her watch. "I'm afraid it's time."

Victoria tries not to let any panic show on her face, while Fraser laces his fingers through hers.

Thatcher shoots a disapproving, thin-lipped glance at their joined hands, but says nothing before she turns around and walks them up the rest of the way.

\---

_I'm not going to fall out of this chariot,_ Victoria resolves to herself, holding tight to Fraser's hand with her left and the front of the chariot with her right. _I am **not** going to fall out of this chariot._

She hopes that this resolution doesn't show on her face.

Not unlike the cars and trains she's ridden in since the Reaping, horses and chariots are in very short supply in District Four. The big animals' prancing makes her dizzy, and makes it remarkably difficult for her to hold a standing pose in a thing with wheels. This isn't helped at all by the dangerously-high heels that Katherine had thrown on her before they left the dressing room, or that she's on national television before the entire country, or the small fact this is the first in-person look she's gotten at her competitors.

As the Games' pounding drums begin to play, an announcer calls out for the entire crowd to hear, "District One- Caroline Morgan and Jolly Hughes!"

Three chariots ahead of her, a pair she can't really make out under all the glass bottles, furs and jewels they've been heaped with (she guesses their stylist decided to bury them in all of District One's luxury goods, rather than try to select one or two for a theme) start their way down the parade row.

Victoria strains to see them in the giant screen mounted on the presidential mansion. These are the first of the Careers, the ones she has to worry the most about.

The girl, Caroline, is brown-haired, blue-eyed, and haughty-looking, and- unless her heels are three times the size of Victoria's- unnervingly tall. Victoria can't tell much else about her, but she has the sinking feeling that she'll be as deadly and vicious as any one of her forebears.

The boy, Jolly (and if that isn't the most District One name Victoria's ever heard, she'll eat her own tongue), is worse. Not handsome enough to be prettied up for the cameras- he has a rather large forehead that isn't helped by a hairline that's already begun, even at this age, to recede- his stylist has tried to play up his strength instead. He isn't huge, but he looks at least as solid and strong as Fraser, and nothing has been done to disguise his fistfight-damaged teeth or the scar over one eye that looks like it came from the edge of a sword. Fistfights and swordfights he's had preparing to kill her. Her stomach gives a nervous twitch.

"District Two- Nadia Timoshev and Charles Carver!"

It isn't worth straining for a look at these two, Victoria quickly discovers. They've both been so thoroughly made up to resemble stone statues that she can't make out a single feature. What she can see of their eyes doesn't reassure her. They both look cold and hardened. She hopes it's just the makeup.

"District Three- Stella Dubois and Stanley Kowalski!"

Victoria's stomach gives another jolt as the chariot directly in front of her takes off down the line. These two, she gets the disconcerting double-image of their backs in front of her and their faces on the big screen at the same time. They look younger than her- or possibly the same age but better-fed- and are as blond as anything. They almost look like siblings.

The girl looks as nervous as Victoria feels (she counts this as a victory), but at least has a better stylist than the ones ahead of them. She's been clad in a short sheath dress, with tiny capped sleeves, that seems to be made entirely of silvery mesh, shimmering black silk, batteries, and computer chips. The dress puts Victoria in mind of a suit of light gladiatorial armor. A motherboard circuit has been painted across one half of the girl's face from chin to hairline, which probably draws some of the Capitol's attention away from the way her enormous blue eyes are anxiously darting left to right.

The boy's makeup has been done to match, though his outfit isn't doing any favors to disguise how skinny he is. He's got a tight necklet, like Fraser's, made out of computer chips, matching (in shape if not color) the buckles on the leather kilt he's wearing- his only piece of clothing.

Both have bracelets like Victoria's- a cuff around the wrist that is linked to rings- but where hers is thin and delicate, theirs are solid and robotic, and the rings are wrapped around every one of their fingers. She can't help thinking that they look as though they're made of human bones that have been dipped in platinum or white gold.

Like her and Fraser, the pair of them are holding hands, though theirs are clenched so hard that even from here she can see their knuckles turning white. _Friends?_ , she wonders.

Her time to ponder this is cut short when the announcer's voice rings out like a death knell, "District Four- Victoria Metcalf and Benton Fraser!"

Their horses pick up the pace, jostling her hard enough that Victoria rethinks her assessment of Three's relationship. Her hand on Fraser's tightens so hard against her will that she can feel her own knuckles turning white.

The crowd cheers for them with more exuberance than they cheered for the three chariots ahead of them. For a moment, she feels buoyed by this, but then she notices that around two dozen people in the crowd are holding signs with pictures of doves and little scraps of phrases like "RIP D4 Champions!"

And if that hadn't been enough to bring down her mood, Francis Bolt is standing on the mansion's balcony, just below the screen, smiling his subhuman smile at her.

She's getting support for the same reason that smug little bastard dragged her here. Everyone's mourning the loss of the _real_ Tributes.

Victoria decides to devote the rest of her attention to examining her remaining opponents.

Unfortunately, from her current vantage point (too close to the screen to properly see it, too far ahead of the other chariots to make them out without fully turning around), she doesn't get a very good look. She manages to notice that further down the line ("District Seven- Janet Morse and Renfield Turnbull!") have been wrapped in vines and rough linen to look like trees, and far, far in the back, District Twelve's poor Tributes have been made to suffer the humiliation of a stylist who thinks nudity is the last word in fashion. Both have painted head to toe in coal dust, the only concession to their dignity strategically-glued pieces of synthetic coal chunks with some red, glowing accents that suggest they're being barbecued.

By the time the parade has begun to make a full lap around the row, President Bolt has appeared on the balcony of his mansion and taken over the screens that show Tribute faces, so Victoria will have to be content with what little she's managed to see.

The President's long, silvery hair has been tied back in a ponytail, his beard neatly trimmed to make him look far more polished than he is. Unlike the rest of the Capitol, he doesn't seem to feel the need to get horrific enhancements in the form of tattoos, piercings, or hair and skin dyes. He looks like a normal person. Insofar as a normal person can look that delighted about the Hunger Games, anyway.

He starts with his usual speech, which Victoria has never managed to listen to beyond the opening sentence- "Happy Hunger Games!" What she's never caught on television before is that he actually screams it at the top of his lungs. (She has always assumed it was some effect of the microphone pinned to his lapel.) He pumps his arms in the air triumphantly, as if the Games are already over (which, in their way, they are- you don't have to watch them to know twenty-three kids are going to die) and as if he's the one who won them (which, in his way, he has- no one else gets much benefit out of the damn things).

He launches into the rest- about honor and glory and duty to one's country- without any more preamble, and crows about it with such glee, Victoria has to wonder if he actually believes what he's saying.

Just behind him, never far out of the corner of her eye, Vice Consul Bolt seems to practically glow with menace. In contrast to his brother, he doesn't seem to be taking any real pleasure in the Games themselves. His victory seems to be in the fact that all of them are here, ready to die at his word.

The cameras switch their views from the President to each set of Tributes, in flickers of back and forth that make her dizzy. Once, she spots herself up there, larger than life, looking beautiful in her dress and terrible with hauteur. The crowd with memorial signs for the Ludus cheers at her appearance, and she sees her own expression on the monitor become more pinched with disgust. Far from being discouraged, the crowd seems to thrill at this. Victoria suspects that looking above it all is something they value in their champions.

When the camera switches away from her to the coal-smeared girl from Twelve, Victoria risks looking back to see Francis Bolt. For some reason, the cameras never focus on him.

He notices her looking, and gives her a smile that makes her wish she hadn't turned around.

_Is this what you wanted,_ she tries to ask with her eyes. _Is the Capitol's reaction everything you hoped for?_

His smile widens.

"Victoria?" Fraser murmurs beside her, startling her. She'd forgotten he was here. "Are you all right?"

"Bolt," she says.

Fraser looks- not at the president, but right at the Vice Consul. He looks back ahead and wraps an arm around her shoulders, sending the District Four supporters in the crowd into wild screaming.

"Just look away," Fraser says quietly. "Look away."


	11. Chapter 11

After the parade ends, Stella wants to do nothing more than go hide in her bedroom in the Training Center forever.

Her makeup and outfit- cutting edge, according to her stylist- looks so ridiculous that she feels like her parents must've been humiliated to see her in it in the broadcast. (Not that she can know for sure- while the version shown at home always has reaction shots of friends and family members after each Tribute's debut, the version on the big screens at the parade showed no such thing. She guesses it would be too much to ask to let them see their families one last time.)

Her hand hurts from where her cuff bracelet, jointed all the way down to her fingertips, has dug into her skin, helped along by how tightly she hung on Ray's hand to keep from falling over in her high-heeled sandals in the chariot. Ray had hoped it was a sign she was starting to forgive him. She's still not talking to him when Louise escorts them into the Training Center's glass elevator, Damon Cahill in tow.

"You two should be very proud of yourselves," he says as they cram into the small space. "You looked wonderful out there! And these new haircuts really suit you! They draw much more attention to your faces!"

Stella cards a hand through her hair, shorn off around her earlobes. Ray's has been cut even shorter, razored off an inch above his ear, while the top's been made to stand up with some chemical goop the stylists had. It smells medicinal, and not at all like breakfast.

"Was this what you had in mind?" she asks Louise, tugging at the little duck tail that's formed in the back. She hopes it looks less silly than it feels.

Louise gives her a cool, scrutinizing look. "It's still long enough for other Tributes to get a handful," she says, disapproving, "but at least it won't snag on every tree branch in the arena."

"It looks good, Stell," Ray puts in, looking hopeful.

Stella doesn't answer him. "I guess I'll find out in training whether other people go for it or not."

"I wouldn't practice with too many other Tributes if I were you," Louise says. "If there's anything you can do, it's better for it to be a surprise."

"What if I can't do anything?" she asks. "Don't I need allies?"

"You had best learn to do something, and quickly." Louise looks stern. "Allies are only helpful in the beginning. By the time you get to the final eight, they'll turn on you. It'll be easy, since you'll be right there for them to grab."

"Hey, what about me?" Ray asks, looking indignant. "I'm gonna be there. I'm not gonna turn on her."

Louise gives him a dismissive look. "I think she's been clear so far on not wanting to work with you."

Ray's mouth twists up with hurt. Stella looks away.

The elevator takes them just a little ways up the building. It seems that District Three gets the whole third floor to themselves, and it goes the same way up the entire stretch of the Training Center.

"The practice area is a two-floor side wing from the lobby," Cahill explains. "The same with the hospital wing- in case there are injuries in practice, not that there will be! It's on the other side. The building's shaped like an arrow when you see it from the sky."

Stella doesn't know when they'd ever have opportunity to see it from the sky, or why it'd matter if they did, but she nods anyway. "That's nice."

Ray is mathing this out on his fingers. "If it's a lobby and then twelve floors up, with two on each side, does that mean One doesn't get a window?"

Cahill laughs approvingly, while Louise is giving him the same sharp, measuring look she keeps giving Stella. As far as Stella can recall, she's never looked at him like that before.

"That's an impressive observation," Cahill says. "You're right, of course. The building was first constructed for the Fifteenth Games. By that point, One had already established themselves as the usual winner. Each floor is constructed and catered to based on how much extra help each district is perceived to need. Twelve's view, quarters, and meals are the most luxurious. Yours aren't anything to sneeze at, either! They're nearly twice as lovely as Four's, one floor up."

Stella makes a slight face. In plainer English, he's just told them that they're considered twice as likely to die.

When they arrive at their quarters, it's everything Cahill promised. The living area, with a TV next to the tall plate glass windows, is nearly twice the size of Stella's house at home. The walls are painted a blinding white, while the floors are white and grey marble. The plush couches and chairs, arranged in a half-circle around the TV, are all in brilliant jewel tones. She wonders if their furniture used to be Two's, before they took second place in the running.

Off the living area, there's a lavish dining room that's just as large, with a pale hardwood floor that's been buffed to a shine. The dining table is made of clear glass and shiny steel, and large enough to seat easily twice as many as the usual five people who would eat there- two Tributes, two mentors, one escort. (Though District Three has more than enough victors to come up with two mentors, Stella's learned that the custom has become to pick one for each district, unless the Tributes request another or there's some obvious conflict of interest, like a mentor being related to one of the Tributes. Louise said on the train that it was considered more efficient, but Stella has the impression that this is done so that most mentors don't burn out from the losses, and so that no mentor gets too attached to any one Tribute.)

The table is already set with a lavish meal that puts what they had on the train to shame. Ray and Stella leaps into eating it with such relish that Cahill looks a little disgusted. Louise, as usual, eats nothing. Stella is starting to think that she's somehow trained her stomach not to need food anymore.

"Your training will begin tomorrow," Louise says, watching them over her untouched plate. "I suggest that both of you hit up the survival stations- learn to build shelters, fires, and identify edible plants. We lose nearly a quarter of the field every year to starvation and exposure, never mind the other Tributes."

Stella forces herself to swallow her mouthful of fruit before asking, "Can we learn how to fight? Would that be a bad idea?"

Louise raises an eyebrow. "I wouldn't have thought you'd have any designs on learning combat." Off to her side, Ray looks surprised, too.

She shrugs uncomfortably. "I wasn't going to," she says. "But..."

"You've started having some designs on surviving?" Louise suggests.

Stella shrugs again. "Yes." She nearly adds, _If that's okay._

"You can try some hand to hand training," Louise says. "That's done in a different area, where the other Tributes won't see you practice. Good for making sure they don't know how skilled you are. Or aren't."

"Will you be teaching us?" Ray asks, throwing a grape in the air and catching it with his mouth.

"Not personally," she says. "Most mentors don't do that."

This confirms Stella's trying-not-to-get-attached theory. "So who will?"

"People who've volunteered for it," she says. "Like your stylists."

Ray gives her a dubious look. "They're not gonna be like that, are they?" He tosses another grape into the air and catches it with his mouth again.

Stella is struck immediately by the disconcerting mental image of the woman who cut her hair trying to teach her proper knife fighting. She suspects that she looks as dubious as Ray.

"Of course not," Louise says, rolling her eyes. "They _do_ teach people skills besides fashion out here, you know."

"Yeah?" Ray asks. "Where are they keeping 'em all?" He starts to toss another grape, but before he can get further than picking it up, Louise has pinned his wrist down to the table.

Stella stares. She didn't even see Louise move her hand.

"Sponsors are impressed by table manners," she says, giving him a look so hotly angry that Stella's surprised his hair doesn't catch on fire. "While you're here, you're going to eat like her." She inclines her head sideways towards Stella. "If you don't, I will kill you."

Ray looks some mix of intimidated and perplexed. "Really?"

Louise lets go of his hand. "I'll leave you to your own devices in the arena, which will be as good as killing you. Are we clear?"

Ray rubs his wrist, looking resentful. "Yeah. Fine."

"Good." Both of her hands seem to disappear under the table. Through the glass, Stella can see that she's folded them gracefully in her lap.

Things are quieter after that- mostly because Ray has devoted all of his attention to trying to mirror Stella with the silverware. His efforts seem to be good enough that at least Louise isn't attacking his hands again.

Their plates are eventually cleared away by a strange servant girl whose face is completely covered with a mask from the nose down. Stella decides she doesn't want to ask why she wears the mask.

As their plates are taken, Louise looks at them appraisingly again. "If you like, you can stay up to watch coverage of the Tribute parade," she says. "But if not, you'll be better served by getting a good night's sleep before training begins."

Stella considers whether she really wants to see herself in that stupid makeup again, looking terrified before the entire Capitol, and then considers what Louise really wants her to do.

Ray is still watching her, as the plainly preferred Tribute, for what to do.

She shakes her head. "I think I'd rather sleep."

She guessed correctly. Louise looks pleased. Or at least as pleased as she ever does. "All right, then. Get some sleep. Goodnight."

\---

The next morning, Louise is already gone from the apartment, so it's Damon Cahill who takes them down to the actual training area of the Training Center. He carries on in his gimmicky fashion about how state of the art everything is, while Stella avoids blatant breaches of manners mostly by not talking at all. It's early enough that the sun is barely cresting over the horizon, and when it comes to places she wants to be at this kind of hour, the training gym is a distant third behind back home and in literally any bed she can find.

She's tired enough that when Ray puts his arm around her to keep her from keeling over in the elevator, she lets him.

As the elevator doors open to let them out, Cahill stops them both with a hand on Ray's shoulder. "Far be it from me to override the advice of your very lovely mentor," he says, in a jovial tone that makes Stella want to claw his eyes out, "but while you're here, do consider trying to make yourselves some friends. If you aren't going to work together, you get much more camera time when you have someone to talk to. It's not very interesting to watch you go off by yourself and climb trees or purify water or whatever it is you'll be doing."

Stella gnashes her teeth while the elevator doors slide closed. "How much trouble would I get in if I stabbed him with the fish knife at dinner?"

Ray laughs, far louder than is strictly necessary. "A lot. C'mon. Let's see who you can win over with your sparkling early A.M personality."

"I'm still mad at you," Stella remembers, though this early in the morning, it's difficult for her to remember why.

"Table it for now," he says. "We gotta go present am undying front."

"United," she corrects.

Ray gives her an amused look. "What's the difference?"

About half of the other Tributes turn out to be as sluggish as she is. Two tiny blond kids from District Nine keep to themselves, yawning and having to ask the attendant at the knot-tying station, over and over again, to repeat her instructions. The girl from District Four that Stella thought might make a good ally back on the train has taken over the tree-climbing station; she scales up the synthetic trunk without any gear, finds herself a good sturdy branch, and curls up there. She seems to nap clear through being awarded full marks. The girl from District Twelve has to be led from station to station by her partner, and can't seem to work up an interest in much of anything.

The Careers, by contrast, are so full of energy that Stella wonders if they're on drugs. They ignore all the survival skill stations in order to roll about the wrestling mat and attack dummies with knives. One boy from Five- who keeps giving Stella terrifying looks- has wormed his way into their pack already by demonstrating astonishing skill at archery.

Stella and Ray make their way through a few stations together- he learns to tie a few knots, build a half-hearted shelter, and parlay some skill at juggling into fancy-looking knife-fighting. Stella suspects that this last would've probably looked much less impressive if he hadn't done it with her half-asleep on his shoulder. She hopes they aren't filming this for Louise to criticize later.

She manages to wake up a little by the time they get to edible plants, but there are so few of these to choose from that waking up only brings her to the terrifying conclusion that there won't be much to eat in the arena. She wonders if it would be possible to sneak food into the arena, hidden in the sleeves or pockets of whatever her uniform will be. Assuming it has either, anyway.

Rubbing the back of her neck to try and calm herself down, she starts to wander back away from the survival station and ends up barreling into the pair from Twelve.

"Oh, excuse me," she starts, then flinches when she remembers that she is in the Training Center for the Hunger Games, not one of her mother's upscale parties back in District Three. She may have just earned herself her first enemy in the arena through sheer clumsiness.

The wan and delicate-looking girl she walked into doesn't look angry, though. She gives her a tentative smile. "No harm done."

The boy beside her looks torn between worried and pleased, for no reason Stella can figure out. He's examining the girl for any visible damage when he asks Stella, "You okay?" He doesn't seem interested in her answer, but she decides to take it as an encouraging sign, anyway.

"Yeah," she says. She decides to make a show of checking the other girl for bruises, too. "I'm sorry. I really didn't mean to bump into you. I haven't woken up yet."

The girl looks a little overwhelmed by all the attention, but smiles again. "Me, either. Really, it's okay."

Stella thinks of Cahill's advice, and then wonders, _How many more chances will I get to do anything like making friends?_ "I'm Stella."

The boy from Twelve looks somewhat frustrated when the girl offers Stella her hand. "Irene Zuko."

The name sounds familiar, though Stella doesn't immediately place it. "Nice to meet you."

"Thanks. You, too."

Ray chooses this moment to return from the bathroom, wandering over in her direction without taking notice of the other two. "How'd you do with the weeds? I don't think I'm gonna do too good at that one. I can't really see 'em."

"Is this your district partner?" Irene asks, her tentative smile returning. She seems noise-shy and anxious about every new person that happens to get close enough to her that she might have to talk to them.

Ray seems to pick up on it right away and visibly dials up the charm. "District partner and boyfriend," he says, then adds, "She's mad at me right now, but she doesn't remember why."

Stella glares at him for this introduction, but it puts Irene at ease and even draws a slight chuckle out of the boy.

"She does that, too, sometimes," he says, jerking his thumb in Irene's direction.

A pang of sympathy breaks its way out of Stella's heart before she can stop it. "Oh, are you two--?"

"No," Irene says, too quickly to be anything but a strategic lie. She tries to recover. "We've been friends since we were little, though."

Ray doesn't seem suspicious of this story. He just winces. "That sucks, huh?"

The other boy covers, much more smoothly, "It'd suck a lot more if I was dating her. Sorry 'bout that." He nods at the number emblazoned on Ray's shoulder. "So, Three- land of the freaks and geeks, right?"

Ray gives a shrug, allowing that this might be so. "I'm the freak, she's the geek. Her dad was an engineer before he went into politics, and her ma was a designer before she went into mom-ing. She's got the brains to show for it."

Stella tries to think of how this information could be in any way compromising- she suspects that this is the kind of thing that Louise wouldn't want them handing out to every other Tribute they meet- but comes up with nothing. She tries to look embarrassed. "He's just saying that because he's trying to get back on my good side."

Ray shrugs again, this time with an innocent little smile, but doesn't correct her. He must've guessed that Louise would be annoyed, too. "Is it working?"

Stella just rolls her eyes.

Irene and the other boy laugh at this. Irene looks reluctant again. "So, you're... trying to find allies?"

Her heart does a hopeful little skip. "Well, maybe."

"Our mentor said not to," Ray puts in. "But we got it from a higher authority that she might be crazy and we should give it a shot."

"Mine hasn't really said anything one way or the other," the other boy says. "Hers, either, that I know of."

Stella blinks. "You each have your own?"

Irene looks uncomfortable. "Our last victor was my brother."

Ray's expression darkens at this, and he sounds a little colder as he asks, "What year?"

The other boy inches closer, protective, to Irene as she answers, "Seventy-eight. Three years ago."

Ray relaxes. Stella rubs one of his arms. "Ray's brother volunteered for him last year. He didn't make it."

The other boy winces. "Sorry."

Ray gives him his best _it is what it is_ sort of look. He's not really interested in condolences after all this time.

"Boy, do you got rotten luck," the boy continues. "Must be the name."

"The name?" Stella asks.

Irene gives a slight smile and puts her hand on her partner's chest. "Ray Vecchio," she says.

Ray laughs. "There's a coinkydink for ya." He offers Vecchio his hand. Vecchio shakes it.

Some small measure of good-humored spite bubbles up in Stella's mind, and she adds, "His real name's Stanley."

Ray makes a face. "No one calls me that but my ma," he says. "You do, and I'll kick your head in."

An awkward silence descends. What would have been a joke back in Three doesn't sound quite as non-threatening in training for the Hunger Games.

Ray gives them a helpless look. "Sorry," he says. "Forgot where we were for a minute."

Irene still looks stricken, but Vecchio seems to take it in the spirit it was meant. "Happens," he says. "So what the hell _should_ we call you? I'm not going around bleating my own name, and it's gonna get confusing quick if Irene does."

Ray scrutinizes him for a moment. "I can live with being Kowalski," he says.

"Okay," Vecchio agrees. "Kowalski."

Stella tries to give Irene a reassuring smile. Irene just barely manages to give one back.

Ray runs a hand through his hair- still standing on end from whatever the preps put in it yesterday. "So. You wanna tries this... allies thing?"

"Frankie's probably hoping to get Irene in with the Careers," Vecchio says. Then he shrugs. "Can you do anything?"

Ray gives him a grin. "I can juggle like nobody's business."

That gets a laugh. "Okay, sure," Vecchio says. He glances at Irene, a little guilty. "Uh, unless you don't want?"

Irene hesitates. "Maybe for now," she says. "Then just see what happens in the arena?"

Stella bites her lip. She guesses it was too much to hope for that they'd make a real ally on the first day. Then again, considering Vecchio and Irene and their origins, Louise will probably be tearing her hair out just because they offered. _You tried to make an alliance against my explicit instructions,_ Stella imagines her saying, _and didn't even have the decency to pick someone from a better district than Twelve?_

Ray just takes it in stride. "Okay," he says. "So just buddies, then."

"Sure," Vecchio says, with somewhat less than perfect enthusiasm. "Buddies."


	12. Chapter 12

Victoria's morning has not got off to the best start.

Breakfast in the Capitol was just as delicious- and just as gigantic- as the food on the train, but things had gone quickly downhill from there. Thatcher was called away to take a phone call during the meal, and had returned with a pinched, irritated expression to inform them that she would not be able to train with them after all. She'd been scheduled, without her knowledge, to take sponsor meetings all day.

"I'll try to work in time for private sessions with you tomorrow," she'd said, "before your individual assessments." She didn't look optimistic for this happening, though.

"I would be happy to practice foraging with you at the survival stations, if you'd like," Fraser had offered.

Victoria had declined. She's already perfectly well-versed in foraging, assuming the bugs and plants in the arena won't be too different from the ones back in Four. What she really needs is some training with a weapon.

Still, the sponsorships were important, and there's nothing to be done for it, anyway. She'd put on her training uniform and come down to the gym without saying much of anything else. Maybe if she was lucky, she'd learn something else she could use.

Thatcher advised her on the way out the door to keep her skills quiet for now, in case any of the others were examining her potential as a threat, and that while One and Two were traditionally allies with Four, she shouldn't be too eager to jump into an alliance with them. Victoria's not sure if this is because One and Two are also traditionally Four's killers at the end of that alliance, or if she thinks that One and Two won't want her. Her pride rankles at the latter. Certainly, they aren't going to want Fraser, the conscientious objector, but Fraser's a lost cause anyway. They don't have to come as a packaged deal. Surely Thatcher thinks she must have something to offer.

Victoria goes through three of the survival stations on her own- fire building, dowsing, and edible plants. (She's heartened to see they've included rose hips, dandelions, and watercress- and that the watercress won't be much help to the other Tributes, since the station neglects to actually show what it looks like in water.) Halfway through, she notices that Fraser doesn't seem to be downplaying his plan to not kill anyone at all; he's parked himself at the fire building station, and annoys the attendant by taking over in offering lessons to anyone who wants them.

Definitely a lost cause.

When she heads for the tree climbing station, it's mostly for the benefit of the Gamemakers- who are probably watching and already evaluating them for the skills they'll try to show off in individual assessment- but once she's up there, she doesn't want to come back down.

From here, she's got an excellent vantage point of all of the other Tributes.

Fraser's been pushed out of the fire building station by the attendant, and has moved on to helping anyone who'll let him over at the foraging station (so much for her advantage with the watercress), but the only ones who seem to want to accept his help are the three little ones from Nine and Eleven. Even then, it's mostly the girls- the little boy from Nine looks suspicious, and only relents when his partner insists that an older kid willing to help them is a blessing.

Though she's not sure what use it will be yet, she makes a mental note: _District Nine: one's skeptical, the other's practical. Smarter than they look._

The other little girl, whose braids and beads have been removed in favor of allowing her hair to spring up in tight curls around her face, hangs around shyly after her lesson from him to help teach others, leading to the note _District Eleven: good with plants, smitten with Fraser._

Since there are six synthetic trees at the station and she's not in danger of being ordered to move as long as she stays out of the attendant's way, Victoria climbs up into the highest branch that will support her weight and pretends to sleep so she can keep watching.

Two possible alliances are born over the course of the morning- the pair from Twelve seems to more or less hit it off with the pair from Three, while the boys from Ten, Eleven, and Six become friends so fast that it's downright unnatural. The other two trail the boy from Eleven everywhere he goes, and the boy from Twelve jokes that they're following him like "little baby ducks." It catches on, and soon, everyone in the Training Center is referring to the trio as the duck boys.

_District Twelve: subtly charming._

"Hello up there," a voice calls from the base of the tree trunk. "Getting a nap in?"

Victoria turns her gaze downwards, through the branches, and sees Jolly, the District One boy, grinning up at her with his jagged, broken teeth.

She wants nothing more than to retreat higher in the tree, get further away from him. She's halfway to actually doing it before she sets her teeth and forces herself to stop. Fleeing might make her feel better, but it will make her look weak.

She lets her legs slide from the branch, holding herself up by her arms until she's in a good, straight dangle, then lets herself drop to the floor between the branches. Shocks of pain bloom along her ankles- she was really too high up to do that- but she ignores them, pasting on what she hopes is a friendly smile. "I wasn't sleeping."

"I didn't think so," Jolly says, still giving her that shark-toothed grin. "I saw your eyes open when I was at the knife station. You've been watching everybody."

Victoria curses in her head, but keeps up the smile. "Seemed like a good idea to learn who I'm up against."

Jolly laughs. "I can respect that. See anything good?"

She makes her face cool and impassive before it can make itself slide over into wary. District One can get its own damn intel, if that's what he's after. "I saw enough," she says.

He can tell he's misstepped. His grin vanishes in favor of something more sympathetic. He does it about as well as Francis Bolt. "Relax," he says. "I'm not here to pick your brain."

Victoria folds her arms across her chest. "Then what are you here for?"

He shrugs. "Well... I figure this may be your last chance to have a man appreciate that you're a pretty girl."

She suppresses a shudder. That's almost worse than him wanting to pump her for information. She forces a smile. "It might be your last chance to appreciate a pretty girl."

Jolly smiles unpleasantly. "Just between you and me, I doubt it."

Victoria wonders why on earth he'd think that would be a secret. "I won't say anything to your allies," she says.

"Oh, I hope you'd say _something_ to my allies," he says. "I was hoping you would come over and say hello."

She glances over to the rest of the Careers. Jolly's partner is wildly swinging an axe, spinning on her toes to attack multiple imaginary opponents. The boy from Two is playfully swinging a flanged mace in her direction, letting her bat it away with the axe blade, while the girl from Two is melting into the background at the camouflage station. All four of them are, unquestionably, the most talented fighters in the room. They're also, unquestionably, the least trustworthy.

"Maybe," Victoria allows. She takes on a haughty tone. "If no one else catches my interest."

Jolly laughs again. "You can certainly talk like a Career. You drop out of school?"

She bristles. "What makes you think that?"

He looks at her as if to say, _Who do you think you're kidding?_ He picks up one of her bony wrists and holds her arm up between them. His fingers are sweaty and sticky. "You don't _look_ like a Career."

Victoria keeps up her impassive face as she pries her arm out of his grip. "My sister went to the Ludus," she says, then adds, "My parents could only afford to send one of us, but she taught me everything she knew on the weekends." Three statements, only one of them a lie. It sounds plausible enough.

Jolly's eyes take on a little gleam. "Did she?" He looks her up and down. "Was she good?"

"She lost."

His smile has a new air of smugness. "Couldn't have been that good, then."

"Good enough to make it to the final four," she says. Another truth- albeit one that implies Valerie went down in the typical Career meleé, when she had only narrowly survived a mutt attack that took all of them, and then been dispatched with a rock by the designated loser when she was too injured to fight back.

"Then maybe good enough," Jolly says. He reclines back against the tree trunk, smiling at her lazily. "Cutting to the chase here- I can see that you're a woman who likes to get down to business--"

Victoria not only hates getting down to business, but would generally prefer to be far away from anything considered "business," but she doesn't dispute the point.

Jolly straightens up so he can lean his face in uncomfortably close to hers. "District Four has always been one of ours. We'd like to have you aboard. You _and_ your boy, if you think he'd like to come along." He glances at Fraser, who is now deeply entrenched in explaining the intricacies of snare-setting to a rapt audience of twelve-year-olds. "He seems like he's following the don't-show-off advice to the letter, but nobody from Four looks like that without some real fight in him."

She stifles a snort, but again chooses not to dispute the point. "What makes you think we'd have you?"

"Because Four is one of ours," he says, as if this should be self-evident and require no further explanation. "That's the way it's always been."

Victoria gives him a chilly smile. "Fraser and I aren't traditionalists."

"C'mon," he says. "Why don't you try us on for the afternoon, just to break up the monotony?"

She gives him another smile that would be even chillier, were it not already at absolute zero. "Tell me why I should."

Trying to think of something that actually makes sense seems like it's not one of Jolly's strong suits. It takes him a while to hit on an idea. "How 'bout this," he says. "It's been a while since your sister kicked it, right?"

Victoria gives him the slightest of nods.

"So you must be out of practice," he says. "How about I give you a recap on knives?"

He may be slow to come up with ideas, but she has to admit, he's capable of coming up with good ones. Everything in her is screaming to take him up on this, to learn how to use a weapon from someone who knows what he's doing. She'll need it in the arena, and Thatcher's too busy at business lunches to take care of it herself.

She hesitates for a moment. But only a moment. 

"Fine," she says. "But just for now."

Jolly smiles.

The knife station is a popular one among Tributes who don't already know how to use a weapon- probably because they're lightweight and easy to carry, and at least a little familiar to anyone rich enough to have eaten with silverware- and there's already a long line. This doesn't seem to bother Jolly any. He pulls her along, shoving his way past everyone already there, and daring them to protest with his jagged, broken smile. This includes the station attendant, who looks annoyed, but hands over the knife block all the same.

Jolly takes four large, wicked-looking curved knives from it and hands two of them to her, one in each hand. He arms himself the same way.

"You don't have the arm strength to stab," he warns her. "So what you want to do is slash. It takes less than a pound of pressure to break skin. Even the cannon fodder babies could do it. Hold them like this."

Victoria adjusts her grip on each knife. "Then what?"

He shows her a few basic moves, slashing upwards for the throat and face, downwards for the torso, and across for each arm. He points out veins and arteries that bleed beyond recovery with the slightest nick. He takes her through each motion, step by step, five times each until he's sure she's got it. She tries them all three times on her own while he watches, just to be sure.

"Now," Jolly says, "come at me."

She does.

Victoria whirls at him, swinging, slashing- bringing her blades within centimeters of all of his vulnerable spaces in a matter of seconds. She moves fast enough that the world around her seems to disappear into one gigantic blur. On the wall behind him, a tally clock tracking their motions adds up all the ways she'd have killed him by now if she was doing this for real.

This is wonderful. This is easy. Why has no one ever told her how easy it could be? She's delivered Jolly eleven separate "fatal" blows by the time she has to stop for breath. 

She's sweating and panting hard, her heart trying to beat its way out of her chest, when she notices that the rest of the world has come back, and everyone in it is watching her.

The small children are lined up by the attendant's table, pop-eyed and slack-jawed, staring at her with total awe. Many of the other Tributes are looking at her like they can't believe she's real. Including one or two of the Careers.

Jolly sidles up behind her, moves her hair away from her ear, and whispers, "So that's what you're good at."

 _He tricked me._ Thatcher gave her only two pieces of advice for training down here in her absence- don't show off, and don't get too close to District One- and he had gotten her to go against both of them. Whatever advantage she might have from learning the knives is almost mitigated by the fact that the Careers know she can do it. 

Taught her _how_ to do it. So they already know how to counter it.

Victoria tosses both knives down on the floor. "Thanks for the lesson," she says. Jolly's laugh follows her as she makes her way out of the station.

_District One: Avoid at all costs._


	13. Chapter 13

"Well, Kowalski," Ray says. "It's official. You're bad at everything."

Kowalski scowls. "Oh, screw you," he says. "I was great at knot tying! Wasn't I, Stella?"

Kowalski's girlfriend- currently seated on the floor, getting impossibly tiny braids woven into her hair by Irene- has clearly not been paying attention. "What?"

Kowalski looks wounded. "Would you tell him, please, that I'm a great knot-tyer?"

"Sure," she says. "The best."

This is not as sincere and enthusiastic an endorsement as Kowalski was hoping for. He crosses his arms over his chest, looking petulant.

Ray shoots the girls a look of amusement. "While you two were playing beauty shop," he says, "Hunkadelic here was flunking out of camouflage." He gestures at where Kowalski is covered in brown and green paint, in no way blending in with the grey and white tree trunk he's leaning against. Ray wonders if Kowalski is color-blind on top of being regular blind.

"Oh, Ray," Stella says, taking in the picture he makes with a disappointed shake of her head.

"If there were leaves on this tree," Kowalski says, "I would be _invisible_ right this very second."

Irene looks up from Stella's hair with a small smile. "If there were leaves on that tree," she says, "they'd probably fall off trying to cover you up." Both girls crack up laughing while Kowalski pouts. This has been the standard at nearly every station they've practiced on.

It's kind of amazing. Ray's never thought that it would be possible for training for the Hunger Games to be _fun._ It certainly didn't start out that way. Irene had woken up this morning in another one of her ghost-like funks, retreating into herself like she wished she was dead. Hooking up with the District Three kids has been like a small favor granted to him by God. They've both had her laughing and smiling and making jokes and friendly conversation.

Ray's pretty sure he's gonna pass on this allies thing- Kowalski really is bad at just about everything, and Stella's only better in such categories as "consistently remembering right from left" and "being able to see six feet in front of her"- but for now, "buddies" seems to be working out okay. At least, if your standard of measurement for okay is Irene Zuko acting like her normal self, which Ray's kind of is.

Above their heads, a buzzer goes off in an ear-splitting tone that lasts way too long, like maybe you'd miss it if were any shorter or less headache-inducing.

"Hey, maybe I won something," Kowalski says as it finishes, setting the girls to giggling again.

A voice Ray doesn't recognize from any of the press stuff (which probably means it's a Gamemaker) booms out over the loudspeaker. "Attention, Tributes: the afternoon meal is being served in the Tribute Café, accessible from the door on the eastern wall. Please proceed in an orderly fashion to your repast. Happy Hunger Games, and may the odds be ever in your forever!"

Ray rubs one of his ears as he looks towards the girls. "Wanna get something to eat?"

Irene finishes Stella's braid and gets to her feet. "I'm starving."

"So's Stella," Kowalski says. "I promise."

Stella rolls her eyes and also gets up. "Do you want to go together?"

"Sure," she says. Then she looks to Ray like she wants to know if he'd mind.

He snorts. "I shudder to see what Kowalski's like with a fork," he says. "But sure, okay."

"Har-dee-ha-ha," Kowalski says. "Let me wash this gunk off first."

While he works with the towel, most of the rest of the room is already filing out the door to get their lunch. Ray makes a face at him. "Seriously, bad at everything. Could you do that any slower?"

"You want it done quick, or you want it done right?" Kowalski asks.

"Is that the dilemma you've been facing all day?"

Kowalski swings for him with the towel, and, predictably, misses, to the great amusement of everybody else.

The Tribute Café, when they get there, turns out to be something of a letdown. The food looks and smells as great as the food anywhere else in the Capitol, but by no stretch of the imagination is this place a café. The room is gigantic, filled with a dozen different round surgical steel tables that are each big enough to comfortably seat all twenty-four Tributes, if someone could actually persuade all twenty-four Tributes to want to sit and eat together. The floor is shiny, grey-and-white speckled tile, and the walls are a grey so light, it's hard to tell for sure if that's their color or if it's a white that's tinted by shadow. While there are windows, they're each no bigger than a shoebox, and set up very close to the high ceiling. The whole damn place looks like a school cafeteria on a grand scale.

All of the Tributes who've already grabbed seats have self-segregated along whatever lines have been drawn over the morning's training. Close to one wall is the Career table, where the pairs from One and Two, along with the creepy kid from Five, are sitting together, eating and laughing, and pantomiming what looks suspiciously like Kowalski failing at target practice. It's the little "Give me a second, I will get this!" hand gestures between each mimed shot that gives it away.

Over at another table, about as far away from the Careers as they can get without leaving the building, the pair from Four are huddled over their plates. The girl's cheeks are burning like the Careers are mocking her, and she's eating like she's angry at the food and wants to kill it with her teeth. The boy's a little more poised, and going through the steps of a three-part pattern, which seems to go bite of food, concerned glance at his partner, and concerned glance at the three twelve-year-olds that are wandering the cafeteria like ping-pong balls being bounced from table to table.

Kowalski's frowning at them. "What's up with Four?" he asks. "Shouldn't they be yukking it up with the Careers?"

Stella beats Ray and Irene to explaining. "They aren't Careers," she says. "Louise told me. Four lost all theirs in some kind of freak accident. These two are what the district had left."

Kowalski's eyebrows jump up. "Seriously?"

Irene nods. "I heard about it on my brother's radio."

He gives all three of them a suspicious look. "Was I the only one who didn't know that?"

Irene and Stella both look away like they've spotted very interesting things on the floor and ceiling. Ray has no such compunctions. "Yep. One more thing you're slow to the punch on."

Kowalski makes a sarcastic fake-laughing face, then looks back at Four. "We should go say hi."

Ray blinks. "Why?"

He shrugs. "Why not?"

"You don't need a reason?" Irene asks.

Kowalski looks put-upon. "Way I figure it, they're from a Career district, without being Careers. So they got the pedicure without the attitude."

"Pedigree," Stella corrects.

He rolls his eyes. "Whatever. All I'm saying is, we should go say hi." And without waiting for a response, he struts straight for Four's table and plops himself down in one of the chairs like he owns the place.

Ray stares. "Seriously?"

Stella gives him a helpless look with a little shrug, which apparently means, _whither goes Kowalski, so goes my nation,_ because she follows him over there and shyly takes the seat next to him.

Irene smiles at him with a weird kind of awkwardness, and- there goes his girlfriend.

"This is nuts," Ray says, to no one in particular, before following them over.

Both of Four, male and female, looks overwhelmed by their sudden popularity.

"Hey," Kowalski says- probably wanting to introduce everybody before anyone else at the table has the chance to introduce him as Stanley. "How's it going?"

The boy from Four looks nonplussed, but he's as polite here as he was in his Reaping tape, so he doesn't ask what the hell they're doing at his table. "Ah- very well, thank you. And you?"

"I am excellent," Kowalski says, digging into his food. With his mouth full, he points at the rest of them with his fork. "'M Ray, this is Stella, Irene, and Vecchio."

"Also Ray," Ray says, rolling his eyes. He swats at Kowalski with a napkin. "I can't take you anywhere."

Kowalski glares at him, but seems to be in imminent danger of choking, so he wipes his face without reply.

"Hi," Irene says, looking reluctant. Everything from her face to her posture seems to be screaming, _Is it okay if I sit here?,_ so Ray switches seats with Stella so he can wrap his arm around her shoulders.

"Hi," the girl from Four says, looking wary.

The boy tries not to miss a beat. "A pleasure," he says. "I'm Benton Fraser. And this is my- associate, Victoria Metcalf."

"How do you do," Victoria says, looking like she desperately wishes she could unload Fraser and his manners. Since that possibility seems to be out of her reach, she scoops up some potatoes with her fingers and pops them into her mouth in a remarkably resentful fashion.

"You were the knife girl, right?" Kowalski asks. "I didn't really get a good look."

Victoria's mouth tightens up. "Yes," she says. For whatever reason, this seems to be something she's not particularly proud of.

"Pretty good show," Ray says. "I wanted to put in an ally bid the second you finished. Everybody did." He's not making it up to try and make her feel better, either. In two minutes, she went from being a stick-thin forest child no one noticed except to see how far Four had come down in the world to being somebody you wanted between you and the Careers when the time came.

She shrugs.

"She's a bit embarrassed," Fraser says. "Our mentor had told her not to make any displays that might draw undue attention to her, and the District One fellow goaded her into forgetting this instruction."

Victoria glares at him.

Fraser gives her an apologetic look. "You really were quite good," he offers.

Ray tries to give a what-the-hell look to Irene, but she's clammed up again, looking pale and horrified in Victoria's general direction. He tells himself to remember to ask about it later.

"If it makes you feel better," Kowalski says, "our mentor told us that, too, and I spent the morning screwing up at every station they got."

"Not _every_ station," Stella says, a little protective. "You did okay at knot-tying."

He looks back to Victoria in a _see what I have to put with_ kind of way, and says, "And that is from my girlfriend."

This seems to disarm Victoria a little. "Everybody probably thinks you screwed up on purpose."

"Nah," Kowalski says, gesturing at the Career table. "Pretty sure they all think I'm a hopeless case."

At the moment, the girl from District Two is doing a pretty brutal rendition of Kowalski's juggling, which pretty much confirms the diagnosis of DOA.

"Victoria," Fraser says. "Since we seem to be accepting guests--" He inclines his head in the direction of the twelves who still haven't found a place to sit.

She rolls her eyes. "If you must."

"Thank you." He waves the kids over. The girl from Eleven's face lights up and all three are soon crowded in next to Fraser.

"So have any of you picked any allies yet?" Stella asks.

Fraser looks at her like she's just given him a lead into something he's been wanting to talk about all day. "Well--" The table clatters in a way that suggests somebody stomped on Fraser's foot under it. He makes a pained face. "Not as such, no."

Ray figures this as good a time as any to come clean. "We're still mulling it over."

Kowalski folds his hands over his heart. "After the day we've had? I'm crushed, Vecchio."

"You mean the day where you've been messing up left and right? Including _literally_ messing up left and right?" Ray asks. "You're lucky I didn't dump you sooner."

A brief shock of chills goes down his spine, and it takes him a second to figure out why. What he just said was disturbingly close to the philosophy espoused in Pop's parting words.

Flushing a little in the face, he clears his throat and says, "Well. We're still mulling it over, anyway."

"We're sticking together," the little girl from Eleven pipes up. "We decided already."

"We didn't think anyone else would want us," the boy beside her puts in, voice flat.

It seems like it's everybody else at the table's turn to get the guilty chills now.

Fraser to the rescue. "Ah, I'm afraid I've been remiss in my manners," he says. "Forgive me. This is Miss Elaine Besbriss, from District Eleven, who has more or less become the defacto leader of her alliance, and her companions from District Nine- Delwynn Porter, who prefers to be called Del, and Eloise Barrow, who tells me she's a singer in her spare time."

"Hey, crappy first name," Kowalski says to the boy, offering him his fist. "Respect, little man."

Del gives him a confused, but pleased, look, and bumps Kowalski's knuckles with his.

"I like your hair," Eloise says shyly, looking at Stella.

"Thank you," Stella says. "Irene did it for me."

Ray looks to Irene to see how she responds to this, but she's still trying to go catatonic. He rubs a hand up and down her back. "Babe, you okay?"

Irene nods, but makes absolutely no other pretense of being okay.

"Babe?" Kowalski echoes, giving them a shrewd look. He's been trying all day to get them to break the just-very-good-childhood-friends cover. Ray can't remember ever meeting another person who was so good at all the wrong things, and obnoxious about it to boot.

"It's what everybody calls her back home," he sneers. _Ha. Take that._

Kowalski shakes his head. "Yeah. Okay."

More people are already heading for their table- Ray recognizes the duck boys, who are probably being drawn in by Elaine being Jack's district partner; the girl from Ten, who is probably coming because one of the duck boys is _her_ district partner; and, inexplicably, the boy from Eight, who seems to be following Ten Girl and trying desperately to flirt with her.

Irene's stability seems to be hanging on by a thread as it is, so he announces to the table, "Okay, we're gonna get while the getting's good," and stands up, tugging Irene up with him. Alarmingly, she complies without a word.

"Are you going to eat the rest of that?" This question comes to him in surround sound from nearly everybody at the table. 

He guesses there's really nowhere in Panem where anybody's getting enough to eat.

He drops his fork on his plate. "Have at." He looks around for a moment, then slides the plate to Fraser. "Distribute this, would ya?"

Fraser startles, but takes it. "Of course." He starts dividing it into painstakingly even portions, ladling them out to first the twelves, then Victoria, then Stella, and Ray starts guiding Irene out of the cafeteria before he can see the order he hands out the rest.

"Okay, what's the deal?" he asks, tugging her along through the gym and back to the elevator. Any more training for the day is probably shot, anyway, with her in this condition.

Irene shakes her head. "I don't really want to talk about it."

He raises his eyebrows. "That bad?" He can't remember there ever being anything so bad that she wasn't willing to talk to him about it.

"Can I just rest, please, Ray?"

He stops to rub her shoulders while they wait for the elevator. She really looks like she's been put through the ringer. "Okay," he says. "We can do that."

Back in the apartment- according to Moffat, the best one in the whole damn Training center- he settles Irene on the couch and curls up with her. "Wanna watch some cartoons? I used to watch 'em with Maria in the library at school. They actually make some pretty good ones."

"Sure," she says, without enthusiasm.

He turns the TV on and pillows Irene's head on his chest. Frank's going to have a conniption if he comes in and sees them like this, but Ray decides he doesn't really care. Welsh will keep Frankie in check. Ray's got important cuddling-Irene duties to attend to.

As it turns out, Capitol cartoons have gotten much more boring since the last time he watched them in the school library, and before long, he drifts off, Irene breathing peacefully on his shoulder.

When he wakes up, it's after dark, and Welsh is gently shaking him. "Hey, kid."

"Shh," he says automatically. "You'll wake her."

Welsh puts his hands up in surrender, then sits across from him on the coffee table. "Everything go okay?"

"For a while," Ray says. "Kinda started getting to her around lunch time, so we took off."

Welsh shakes his head. "You can't do that again," he says. "You've got individual assessments tomorrow, then another training day after that, plus the Tribute Interviews, and- in case you forgot- the Hunger Games themselves."

Ray carefully pulls his arm out from under Irene so he can rub his eyes. Individual assessments. He’d forgotten about that. Right before the Games go live, there’s a special session with the Gamemakers where each Tribute has to show off whatever skill they think they’ve got to give them an edge in the arena. The Gamemakers judge it on a scale of one to twelve, and then put out a score the same day for the sponsors and bettors to calculate odds. It’s part of how they make the Games into light-hearted fun for the Capitolites, like Pop and his crowd do with the small handful of school sports at home. Ray hasn’t even picked a skill to show off yet.

Actually, he hasn’t even decided _if_ he wants to show off yet.

The thought gives him an unpleasant chill, and he shoves it away to focus on Irene. "I know all that. But she was freaked out."

"She's gonna be a lot more freaked out in the arena," Welsh reminds him.

Ray makes a ‘tch’ noise, throwing up his free hand in frustration. "What was I supposed to do?"

He gives Ray a look. "Get her through it.”

Ray rolls his eyes. "Right," he says. “Just- get her through it. Okay. Sure.”

“I’m serious,” he says. “If you want her as your ally in the arena, you need to get used to pushing her to survive. It’s gonna be hard in there, and she’s gonna want to give up. If you don’t want that happening- I hate to say it, but it’s gonna be on you to carry her.”

Against his will, Ray imagines them in the arena, with Irene clamming up like she did today. His brain rebels against following the image to its logical conclusion, and he has to fight it off, along with a terrible little shudder. He doesn’t want to try to push her through that. He’s not even sure he can. He couldn’t get her to talk about whatever spooked her down there.

Welsh gives him a scrutinizing look. “How’d it go today? Before it started getting to her?”

"Fine," Ray says. "We mostly hung out with Three."

He winces. "You wanna ally with them? I know their mentor. She's not usually a fan."

"Of allies, or of Twelve?"

"Heh. Either."

Ray stares at the TV for a moment, where the Tribute parade is being broadcast again. He watches Kowalski and Stella go by in their chariot, looking nervous but holding each other up, even though Stella was purportedly angry and not speaking to him at the time. 

Their companionship tomorrow might be the difference between whether or not Irene flunks out of individual assessments. In the arena, it might be the difference between whether or not she can keep going.

"Irene really liked Stella," he finally says. "And Kowalski's an okay guy."

"So you do want an alliance?" Welsh asks. "I can work it if you want it. Louise St. Laurent can try to talk them out of it, but she can't refuse an official offer if you all get together in the arena."

"Having some of their sponsor money wouldn't hurt," Ray says. "But I dunno. I was just thinking... maybe Irene would be better off with them."

"What, better with them than you?" He looks perplexed.

"Maybe," he says. "They got her laughing today. Irene played with Stella’s hair.” Welsh looks at him like he doesn’t think much of playing dress-up in the Training Center, so he quickly adds, “They got her to try a lot of different stuff at the practice stations. It made a lot of difference to her to have someone friendly with her besides me.”

He gives him an acknowledging grunt. “That’s her. What about you?”

Ray hesitates. He doesn’t want to admit to this. “I might do better if I don’t have to be with her, when--” He stamps out the thought. “Alliances can’t last forever, right?”

“Not as a rule,” he agrees.

Ray sets his jaw. “Right. Well, she likes them, but they’re new. I’m not. It'll hurt her less to turn on them, in the end." _It’ll hurt **me** less to- **stop it.**_

Welsh gives him one of his pitying looks. "It's gonna hurt either way, kid."

"I know," Ray says. "But..."

He waits patiently for Ray to finish his thought.

"I got two sisters and a brother and a mom," Ray says- and holy hell, has he never had anything he wanted to say less. "My father's useless. They'll be on their own, if I don't come back."

"Irene has two parents and a brother who'll miss her, too."

Ray resists the urge to throw up. "I know that," he says. "I know, okay? You're my mentor- aren't you supposed to be on my side here?"

"What side is that?" he prods.

Ray covers his face with his palm. "I promised my sister I'd try to win."

Welsh looks at him for a while. "You're not being disloyal to her if you say you want to live, kid."

Suddenly, he feels overwhelmed with the urge to cry. Because it does feel like that. It feels like his desire to not be dead is a wish for Irene to go in his place. Like he doesn't deserve to be lying here holding her when he's thinking about how much he just wants to go home. When going home for him would equal never going home for her.

His eyes sting like he's going to burst into tears, and he clenches his teeth so hard that his jaw feels like it's going to shatter.

Welsh reaches over and lays his hand in Ray's hair. "It doesn't mean you don't love her, or that you want anything bad to happen to her. You just want to live, and you want that not to mean that she has to die. It's okay."

"How can that be okay?" Ray asks. His voice comes out ragged and painful with the tears he's still determinedly not shedding.

"Because it's not your fault," he says. "Someone else screwed you over a long time ago. You didn't ask for this. And if there was another way out, you'd take it in a heartbeat."

Ray grabs onto this like a lifeline. "If there's a way for both of us to make it--"

Welsh gets an alarmed look, like he thinks he's given Ray false hope. "There isn't."

"But if there _was,_ " he insists.

Welsh sighs. "If there was, you'd take it. You would never just leave her to die."

Ray nods. "I wouldn't."

"I know."

"I love her."

"I know that, too."

There doesn't seem to be anything more to say.

Welsh stands up. "We kept dinner for you, if you're hungry."

Ray rubs at his eyes. "We slept through it?"

"You did," he confirms. "But you've had a pretty rough week." He gives a wry chuckle. "It's better that it happened here than in the arena."

Ray snorts. "Yeah. Guess so."

"Well." Welsh stands up. "Whenever you're ready. Try to eat well and get back to sleep, if you can. You’ve both still got individual assessments tomorrow.”

“Right,” he says.

Welsh looks back at him. “Give ‘em your best shot, kid. A low score for you isn’t gonna be any service to her.” He walks away without waiting for an answer.

Ray thinks he might hate him.

He stays on the couch and holds Irene as tight as he can. He'll wait for her to wake up before he eats. It's only right.

"I'm never gonna cut you loose," he whispers into her hair. "I promise."


	14. Chapter 14

Jack Huey has never been this nervous before in his entire life.

He can think of occasions that have come close- the Reaping is a big one, though surprisingly, still kinda pales in comparison; he had four safe Reapings, ages twelve through sixteen, before this year, when he finally ran out of luck. (It had lulled him into something of a false sense of security.) There are bigger things- closer things- in his memory. The first time he'd ever asked out a boy. Having to tell his parents about it afterward.

That comes closest, he thinks, because it's the most alike. He's about to put himself out there to be judged. Afterwards, he's going to have to live with whatever the result of that judgment is. For however long he has to live afterwards.

He's not optimistic that this is going to go as well as the previous occasions, though. For starters, the Gamemakers probably won't think he's cute. Then there's the small fact that the Capitol doesn't love him just because he's theirs.

Individual assessment just might be the worst part of the Hunger Games.

He does his best not to fidget in his seat while he waits. He's District Eleven, so if he's counting right, he'll be fourth from last in the whole damn thing. Elaine will go after him, then the pair from Twelve. It's a damn long time to be stuck out here waiting.

It's also a damn long time for the Gamemakers to have to sit around and try to pay attention to them all.

He doesn't know yet what he's going to try to do to impress them. The whole way up to the waiting area, the Careers wouldn't shut up about what they were going to do. "I'm going to put down all of their assistants with a knife!" "I'm gonna hit targets with a blowgun!" "I think I might demo a sword, then chuck a few spears. Why limit myself to just one weapon?"

Jack doesn't know how to do much more with a knife than carve up whatever wild birds happen to wander inside the fence and get caught before the Peacekeepers notice them to put them down and take them away. He's never even seen a blowgun in person, let alone a sword or a spear. Not to mention that it's easy for those four to be excited to show off their superior skills, when they always get to go first.

(He's thought before that the system would be better if they split the Gamemakers into about six teams, so that each of them only has to assess four Tributes. They could do it all at the same time, so nobody has to wait long and it doesn't take all day, and none of the Tributes get looked at by a bored Gamemaker who'd rather be anywhere but here. They could even tape them, so they could watch them all together after, and see if they agree with the first team's score. He'd even thought about writing a letter to somebody like Mackenzie King, to see if they could make it happen. But the mail trains to District Eleven are only for the mayor, the Peacekeepers, and the Capitol liaisons out on official business to use. No Capitol celebrities actually wanted to get letters from poor district kids who thought they knew better how to run the Games.)

The showoff urge isn't limited to just the Careers. Louis, from Ten, whom Jack has been mostly getting to know privately in the Training Center bathrooms, has been pretty cocky about showing off wrestling moves. (Jack allows that this might indeed be very impressive, considering his experience of Louis and wrestling thus far.) The blond boy from Three with the terrible vocabulary is considering juggling knives, even though he can't see well enough to throw them. Then Adolf Kuzma, from Five- usually a fairly mild-mannered district- had licked his chops the whole way up, hinting darkly that he was going to show them exactly what he's willing to do to survive.

It was something of a conversation killer. No one likes Kuzma.

In the waiting area, a voice booms out over the loudspeaker, startling everyone, "District One- Jolly Hughes!"

The balding, scarred one of the Careers gives them all a toothy grin before he steps behind a door.

It's started.

Jack quietly begins to panic. Nothing he's learned so far in the Training Center seems like it'll help. He's decent at camouflage, but it takes a long time, and unlike the Careers, he doesn't want to make the person waiting after him have to wait forever before going in. He's good at edible plants (that farming education is finally good for something), but what kind of score is he going to get for _that?_ It's not going to stick out all that much after watching the Careers demonstrate how brutal they all are.

No one talks while they wait. Everybody seems to be jammed up with their own case of nerves. The girl from Four is busy examining her own hands like they carry the secrets of the universe, while the boy next to her keeps adjusting his posture and scratching his eyebrow. Louis keeps giving affected little sighs and dramatically arranging himself on the bench, trying to telegraph to the whole world how bored he is and just coming off like he's desperate for someone to look at him and promise that he'll be fine. Jack would do it, if he thought that the Gamemakers wouldn't immediately make a liar out of him for spite. The little girl from Nine is trying to be quiet about crying.

If Jack could think of one skill from home, just one, that might be useful, that might actually impress somebody, he'd feel better.

Thoughts of home aren't helping his mental state. His parents and sisters are probably as anxious as he is right now about what score he's going to get. His mom promised before he left that she'd do everything she could to get enough in a collection to try and send him something in the arena- some food or a blanket, at least- but District Eleven doesn't have much to scrounge. If he's going to get anything from a sponsor, it'd be better if it was one of the Capitol sponsors, who spend more on food in a day than his whole family spends in a year.

He closes his eyes and tries to imagine what they're doing right now. It's the middle of summer now, so there won't be any school. His sisters must be up in the groves, picking grapefruit. Mom will be there with them, too, trying to walk off the pain in her back from when she fell two years ago. Daddy will be on the other side, picking the peaches. (Men past puberty don't work the same fields as ladies. It's considered too much of a distraction. Daddy's been teasing him about that since he was fifteen. _They put you in the wrong field if they wanted your mind on work, didn't they?_ )

They'll be let off early in the evening, just after twilight, so they can be back at the square in time for mandatory viewing. Nobody in Eleven has their own television- most of the houses don't even have outlets to plug one into, if anyone somehow managed to get one- so everybody'll be out there, watching to see his score come up.

He imagines someone comforting his mom over him getting a piddling little three.

_Aw, honey, I'm sure he did his best. Those rich people in the Capitol wouldn't know a good boy if he bit 'em._

He buries his face in his hands, pushing the image away so he can follow his family home in his mind.

Their house isn't much. It's like any other house in District Eleven, really- made out of old wood and corrugated tin, held together all but entirely with spit, handfuls of clay, and a whole lot of hope. The roof over their kitchen's partway dented in from a hailstorm last winter, and before the Reaping, he'd been taking on tesserae for three of their neighbors in trade for enough to get a hammer to fix it. Probably what got him here, trying to keep that house together. He's had to do it every year since he turned twelve to keep up with the materials.

He thinks with longing of the nights he's stayed up late with his daddy, patching up holes, beating out dents, singing songs with lyrics that make his sisters blush and his mother scold them not to bring home every damn tune the men sing out in their half of the fields. When his grandfather was still alive, he'd be up there fixing, too, and telling them stories about how when _his_ daddy was young, a man used to have a beer while he did this kind of work, and it made the whole thing go a lot smoother.

Jack opens his eyes. He's got an idea of what he can do.

Louis is from Ten, so when they call him up, it's only his district partner- a big-eyed, fast-handed brunette called Daenalise ("Just Denny," she corrected when he introduced them)- before it'll be Jack's turn.

On his way to the door, Louis pats Jack on the shoulder- and more discreetly runs his fingers down the back of his neck- before he's gone. Jack wonders if he really will show them wrestling.

Louis is gone for only twenty minutes before they call Denny, and she's back there for less than fifteen before the loudspeakers go off again.

"District Eleven- Jack Huey!"

He takes a very deep breath and goes.

The assessment room is a gym, just like the one they've been practicing in, save for being twice as big, with a balcony overlooking the whole thing. Up on the balcony, he counts seventeen Gamemakers before he moves out onto the middle of the floor.

Here goes nothing.

Many of the materials and tools he digs out of the boxes around the wall by the side are ones that aren't available in District Eleven, and couldn't possibly be available in the arena, but they're what's on offer, so they're what he takes.

He starts with twelve pieces of wood (he has to cut them down to the right lengths with one of the axes that are actually there for weapons demonstrations), and builds them up like a cube with no actual sides. There has to be a frame.

He packs the bottom with mud from the camouflage station until it's thick enough and dense enough to hold his weight, then covers it up with a tarp. He packs up the sides with mud and rocks- not as well as he'd like, since he's trying to hurry over with big ones that'll fill it up faster, rather than the small ones that would hold up better and wouldn't have to be made so sticky with mud that they've practically disappeared before they'll stay together. He covers the top with another tarp, then covers that with leaves, branches, and yet more mud.

He doesn't know if it's what the Gamemakers might consider impressive. But he's pretty sure he's the only one who's ever tried building them a house before.

Once he's finished his handiwork, he crawls inside. He imagines his daddy's there to pat his shoulder and murmur, in his quiet way, _That's a fine job, son. Damn fine job._

They let him stay in it for several minutes- he hopes to make sure it won't fall down, not because they're waiting to see if he'll do something else- before the oldest of the Gamemakers calls down, "Thank you. You're dismissed."

As he walks back to his quarters, near the top of the building, he wonders if it'll matter at all.

Back in the apartment, dinner is a quiet affair. He tells no one what he did. Elaine doesn't open up, either, when she comes up after.

Their mentor, Lolla- a big woman in her late twenties that he never had occasion to meet before they came up here- doesn't push them. Instead, she tells a long story about her day in the Capitol, when some damn fool from the fashion quarter tried to chase her down for an autograph. Jack suspects it'd be very hilarious, if he wasn't so worried.

When they turn the television on to watch the scores come up, Jack is on the verge of losing his head again. Why do they all have to _talk_ so much? All he cares about- hell, all _anyone_ cares about- is what the damn numbers are. This whole thing shouldn't take more than twenty-four minutes: one minute of each Tribute's name, district, picture, and score. (He thinks wryly that maybe he should slip Mackenzie King a note to this effect, as long as he's stuck here.) Instead, they ramble on for nearly that many minutes before they even get to it.

One and Two score high. As usual. They're all between eight and ten. How long, he wonders, do they go to school just to make dart-blowing look good enough for that?

Both kids from Three only get fives. The girl from Four scrapes herself a solid-looking seven, while the boy from Four gets himself a two- the lowest of any boy from a Career district in Hunger Games history. Jack wonders what he did to piss them off.

Kuzma nets an eleven.

He loses track a little after that- Dewey from Six, his only other friend aside from Louis, gets a five, and Louis himself manages an eight. They must really be fond of wrestling, he guesses. Elaine gets a four that makes Lolla cuddle her close on the couch.

Jack gets a six.

Six is the halfway score- the midpoint between the pathetic, might-as-well-kill-yourself-and-save-them-the-paperwork one, and the ridiculous, what-did-you-stab-a-Gamemaker-or-something twelve. He's in the middle. He's average. He's not sponsor-repellent.

He goes boneless on the sofa with a sigh of relief.

_Fine job, son. Damn fine job._


	15. Chapter 15

Most of her last day of training goes by in a blur. It’s a little frightening for Stella how good her body’s gotten at doing everything it needs to without her input. She gorges herself at breakfast, showers in her bathroom, and makes another complete lap around the survival stations in the gym without ever really paying attention to any of it.

She wonders wryly if this is the skill that just may carry her through the Games. She could just switch off and kill everyone, and switch back on sometime during the train ride home. It probably would’ve been much more impressive to the Gamemakers in individual assessment than her camouflage demo. (Ray and Louise both assured her afterwards that what she did was fine; there was nothing wrong about a good healthy five.)

The irony is, what’s worrying her now isn’t even the Games. Tomorrow seems further away than ever.

She’s going around on autopilot because she’s scared to death of her pre-Games interview with Mackenzie King.

While Mackenzie King has never quite been the enemy of the Tributes, the way some Games staff is (the Gamemakers come to mind there, along with the meaner escorts and some of the less-talented stylists), she's never exactly been an ally, either. She'll go along with the tone of the interview, and make you look great, provided you're personable enough and can figure out how to play to the cameras. 

But above all, what Mackenzie cares about is _story._ Her number one priority is getting footage that'll set continuity for the Games when the highlights reel goes up for sale. She might make you a hero or a heartthrob, but she'll just as cheerfully make a villain out of you, if you give her even one inch worth of room to do it.

In a little less than an hour, Stella is going to be molded into the preliminary shape of whatever story the Capitol decides to tell themselves about her.

That’s really afraid of. The interview itself won’t be so bad; she’s “pretty enough,” according to Louise, and she’s taken public speaking classes in school, so she should be able to speak well. But whatever _character_ she’s about become is going to be set here. The entire world is about to decide who they think she is, and she has no idea what she wants them to see.

She can’t pull off dangerous, like the Careers. Not after she just pulled a five in individual assessment. Probably not even before that. She’s too small, too skinny, too rich, and she comes from the only inner district that wouldn’t put up a Tribute school. 

She could play on _that,_ she guesses- upper class and intelligent, like much of the Capitol fancies itself to be. But she doubts it would play well to the Games’ real fans and sponsors, who are in it for the great sporting achievement. It might endear her to the techs, engineers, and designers who live here, but the rest of the public would think she was snobby. And so would everybody back home. It wouldn’t be a problem for her parents- they’re used to being thought of as snobby- but it would disappoint Barbara, and Stella doesn’t want her last chance to truly speak for herself to disappoint the woman who’s done most of the heavy-lifting when it came to raising her.

She doesn’t want to try to be sexy (besides being terrible at it, she’s heard rumors about what sponsors expect out of the victors who tried it, and they make her hope that if she wins, they’ll all think of her as an unapproachable prude), and while there’s always the option of confident everyman, she knows damn well that in the Capitol, she’s far from anything any of them might consider relatable.

Stella wishes she’d discussed this with any of the other Tributes she’s met so far. Not to steal their ideas- she doubts she could pull off Victoria’s cool and distant hauteur, and she doesn’t have Irene’s immediate in of being a victor’s sister; Ray’s self-deprecating humor and Vecchio’s blustery charm are also beyond her. But to ask them what _they’d_ buy her as.

(Asking Louise during the four hours devoted to preparing for this thing hadn't been much help. "You only have to fill up three minutes. Just make up something they want to hear. It's usually obvious what the audience's mood is by the time they're done with the Careers." She paid far more attention to making sure Stella could walk in high heels.

Louise seems to suffer a particular delusion unique to very intelligent people: that anyone can do what they do, without having to think about it. Stella's father is the same way.)

She picks lightly at the hem of her dress, hoping the answer might materialize somewhere from its impossibly soft, powder blue fabric. (Her stylist said the material is called velvet.)

As they ride over to the studio in one of the sleek black Games cars, she sees they've done Ray partly to match her. His high-collared dress shirt is the same shade of blue. The trousers are a respectable charcoal grey that he jokes was probably originally intended for Vecchio but got sent to him when the stylists got their Rays crossed. She forces a laugh and promises to keep an eye out for Vecchio wearing baby blue pants.

They’re led into the studio at the same time as the rest of the Tributes. Everyone is organized single-file in a girl-boy-girl pattern that starts with the girl from District One in the lead and ends with Vecchio all the way at the back. He isn’t wearing blue pants, but he still looks unhappy, and he waves back to her with very little enthusiasm when she waves to him. Irene- looking miserable in a black dress with glowy red accents that uncomfortably recalls her parade costume- doesn’t wave back at all.

In a slow-moving march, like everyone in the line is determined not to accidentally bump into each other, they’re walked out onto the stage.

This part is never televised (Stella suspects that Tributes are always meant to appear as if from nowhere, so that the fact that they had lives before the Reaping is always symbolically obfuscated), so the lights in the studio are very, very low. She is able to see exactly enough to take her proper seat, and to make out the shape of over two hundred people crowded into the studio audience. They’re crowded back against the wall of the amphitheater, in ascending tiers where there’s a first row nudging right near the camera equipment, and a back row high up near the domed ceiling. There’s one box above even the highest tier. For the Gamemakers.

She knows from memory that the backdrop behind the Tributes is a black silhouette of the Capitol skyline, against a lighted screen that will slowly phase from the pinks, reds, and yellows of a sunrise to the purples, blues, and blacks of midnight over the course of the interviews. There’s a band far off in a corner, who will not be onscreen during the broadcast, while the opposite wall presses against a clump of stylists, who seem to be waiting to fix any fashion faux pas.

The studio amphitheater is enormous, but there’s so many people that it feels claustrophobic. 

Her palms are sweating and her stomach is churning, and she tries, frantically, to think of some kind of angle. _Maybe I could be innocent? Sweet and naive and enjoying the amenities of the Capitol, like I’m supposed to? Or maybe--_

Stella barely has time to calm herself before the lights go up on Mackenzie King's stage. Off in their corner, the band strikes up, playing some odd mixture between the classical pieces her parents have taught her on rented instruments- the violin, the piano, a few brasses she was never able to lift- and the louder, more mournful stuff they play in the Narrows on guitars and drums. It's jaunty, with a few warbles that'd sound melancholy if they weren't smothered below the rest of it. She thinks she ought to write to the president about changing the national anthem to it.

The lighting is in synch with the music and Mackenzie's entrance, and by the time she's sashayed to her little hoverchair that will move with her as she interacts with each Tribute, the whole place has practically turned into a circus of light and sound. The cheers and applause from the studio audience certainly doesn't help.

Stella closes her eyes and wills it all to go by quickly.

Mackenzie starts up her usual preamble (must everything in the Capitol begin with an exhortation to have a happy Hunger Games?), along with a couple of jokes that Stella’s too keyed up to hear. Either Mackenzie’s really funny this year, or the audience is very excited. There’s raucous studio laughter every time she stops for breath.

“Oh, stop,” Mackenzie says, affecting an air of modesty that would’ve seemed out of place on any Capitolite, but seems especially out of place on the host of the biggest event of the year, who has marked the occasion by twisting and gluing her hair into the shape of the Games’ logo, with upright gold laurels stuck into the sides. She waves one of her gold-fingernailed hands elaborately at the audience, as if she simply can’t take any more flattery and adoration. “We all know why you’re here,” she continues.

 _To see us salute you before we die?_ , Stella guesses wryly.

“To meet your Tributes!” Mackenzie cries, swinging her arm in a sweeping gesture while the lights above their entire row all go up at once.

The audience goes wild with applause, cheers, and ear-splitting whistles.

Mackenzie gestures for them to settle down. As she does, the lights over their chairs subtly dim again. “I hope you’re all excited. I know I am. Let’s get started, shall we?”

The audience screams out an affirmative.  
Stella begins actively trying to tune it all out.

Mackenzie starts with the girl from One, Caroline, and over the course of the next three minutes, they work together to turn her into a monster. Most of it seems to hinge on an exploration of her efficient planning, coupled with a story about a grudge she's still nursing against a girl back in One who landed her in detention once at school. She claims to have carved a likeness of the girl's face into her desk with her fingernails, which Stella doubts, then looks towards the cameras and swears that she'll be coming for that girl after she wins, which Stella is much less skeptical of.

The boy from One, Jolly, gets a similar treatment. He's vicious, but not especially bright, and wastes a lot of his time leering at the other Tributes and dismissing them all as inferior.

Stella's heart begins to pound so hard, she can hear nothing but the sound of her pulse echoing down her ears, and she misses most of what the pair from District Two have to say. She spares a second to imagine it's more of the same- trying to make themselves sound intimidating- but the thoughts practically evaporate from her head when the applause for them ends, and the name Mackenzie King calls next is _hers._

The shaft of light directly above her seat intensifies a little, so that Stella has a brief notion she's being cooked, and before she knows it, her feet have found their autonomy once again. The spotlight from above her chair follows her as she makes her way over to the seat beside Mackenzie.

There are hoots, whistles, and applause as she arranges her skirts to take a seat, and Stella gives them the best smile she can. Most of her face doesn't seem to want to go along with it. She hopes that she doesn't look like she's having some sort of stroke.

If she does, Mackenzie decides not to draw attention to it. It’s much more fun to prod at her other inadequacies. “Stella Dubois, from District Three. Feeling better since your reaping?”

Stella feels her face grow hot, which gets a little titter out of the audience. “Much, thank you.”

“I have to say, you looked plenty shocked when your name came out of the Reaping Ball,” she says. “You weren’t alone. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a mayor’s daughter called before.”

“Well, you would know,” Stella says, as politely as she can. “You’ve met a lot more Tributes than I have.”

This gets some approving laughter from the gallery, while Mackenzie’s own chuckle sounds canned. “Yes. Yes, I have. So tell me- how’ve you been enjoying your stay here?”

 _This is it,_ she thinks. Her chance to break out of the mold of politician’s kid, who had to be called for multiple times and nearly fainted on her escort. (A mold she hadn’t even known until this second that she had.) She paints on her prettiest smile. “Well, the food’s been amazing.”

“How does it compare to what you have in District Three?”

Stella laughs. “It doesn’t.” The audience laughs along with her.

Her interview continues along this vein. Mackenzie sticks to asking her questions contrasting her life before and after, and responding in good humor whenever Stella manages anything that could remotely be described as “cheeky.” 

Her time is almost up, and she knows she isn’t coming off as anything other than well-bred and a little funny. Not characteristics that go very far in the hearts and minds of the Capitol, and certainly not much of a selling point to sponsors.

She takes a leap. “You’re not going to ask me about my five?”

Mackenzie frowns at her. Tributes aren’t supposed to lead the interview, they’re supposed to go where they’re pointed. But she goes along with it. “I don’t think I’ve ever had another Tribute who wanted to brag about a five before!”

Stella supposes that remark is punishment for trying to redirect their course. 

“But all right,” Mackenzie says. “Why don’t you tell us about your five?”

“I was hoping to get a one,” she invents. If nothing else, it’ll be shocking.

“A one?” she asks, eyebrows raising.

Stella nods. “Being underestimated has kind of been my strategy.”

Mackenzie looks amused. “Oh, well, that explains a lot, doesn’t it?”

On a big screen behind her, Stella can see video of herself looking pale and feeble at the Reaping running silently, along with a few of her gaffes in the Training Center, and her giggling with Irene while she braids her hair.

This last wipes away whatever embarrassment she might’ve had from the ones that came before. The way the Capitol takes it for granted that District Twelve’s Tributes are losers- even when one’s a victor’s sister- has gotten very tiresome. 

Stella smothers fury under a smile.

“So are you very disappointed you didn’t get the one?” Mackenzie asks.

“Only a little,” she says. She looks up at the Gamemakers. “But I guess I couldn’t convince them I was really that stupid.”

Before Mackenzie can respond, the buzzer goes off, forcing her to wave her back to her seat.

\---

Ray’s interview comes after hers. 

On the screen behind Mackenzie, there’s footage of him in the parade, shirtless and trying not to look too put out about being made to wear a skirt. It seems the audience remembers this costume with some fondness; they cheer for him in a way that they absolutely didn’t cheer for her.

Ray ducks his head with a little smile and offers Mackenzie his hand to shake as he takes his seat beside her.

Mackenzie takes it with a look of amusement at such a quaint foreign custom. “So, Stanley,” she begins.

“Ray,” he says. “Only person who calls me Stanley is my mother.”

“Oh, excuse me,” Mackenzie replies. “I wouldn’t want to step on your mother’s toes.”

“You wouldn’t,” he says. “She’ll get ya.” He gives the audience a little grin.

They laugh at him, with a light smattering of applause. Stella smiles a little. He has a gift for working with the crowd that she envies as much as she’s glad of it. If her interview wasn’t enough to interest any sponsors, at least his should be. 

“Well, I wouldn’t want that,” Mackenzie says. “So, _Ray_ \--”

“Thank you,” he says, drawing out the A in a kind of singsong that gets another laugh.

“A little bird told me that you’re doing very well here in the Capitol, too.”

“Oh, yeah,” he says, sprawling leisurely out in his chair. “I been making buddies everywhere.”

“Anyone special we should be keeping an eye out for?” Mackenzie asks. “Any good alliances in the offing?”

“Well, there’s Stella,” he says. He kisses the air in her general direction, eliciting a mock-scandalized _ooh._

She rolls her eyes, but pretends to clasp it to her cheek.

“Oh, my,” Mackenzie says. “Perhaps a little more than just an alliance?”

“We’ve been going out a while,” he says. He looks a little more self-conscious. “Uh, her parents aren’t big fans of mine, so, uh, sorry about pronouncing that out loud on national television, Mr. D, Miss D.”

 _Announcing,_ Stella corrects in her head, when Mackenzie doesn’t correct it out loud. Though she supposes that’s not surprising; she’s probably the only person in the Capitol who speaks fluent Kowalski.

She notices the camera is on her, waiting for a reaction shot to having her secret romance “pronounced” on national television, and does her best to put on a mock-contrite look.

Mackenzie gives Ray an indulgent smile. “So you’re a little bit of a bad boy, huh?”

“The worst,” Ray confirms. He leans in and stage-whispers, “Before I got here, I hadn’t had my hair cut in a whole _year._ ”

Even Mackenzie can’t suppress a genuine laugh at that. “So just Stella, then?”

“So far,” Ray says. “Maybe something else will turn out, maybe it won’t, but that’s okay. She’s not bad company. It’s why I volunteered to come out here with her.”

Stella sits up a little straighter in her seat. He still hasn’t explained to her why he volunteered. She’d eventually put it out of her head as not really worth caring about anymore, when they were here and he was the only person she had. Now the question’s back with a vengeance. She’s going to hear his answer on live TV.

Mackenzie, it seems, is as perplexed as she was. “You volunteered so she... wouldn’t be lonely in the Capitol?”

He shrugs and makes a weighing motion with his hands. “Capitol, arena. All that good stuff.”

“Weren’t you concerned about what was going to happen when it came time to win the Games?”

Stella’s heart skips a beat, then starts pounding away for all it’s worth. 

“Nah,” Ray says, shaking his head. “I had a plan coming in.”

“Do tell,” Mackenzie says. She looks so eager, she’s practically about to fall out of her chair. This is the kind of thing that’ll really sell the highlights reel if one of them wins.

Ray puts on a reluctant expression. “It might make her pretty mad.”

The audience makes eager sounds of encouragement while Mackenzie clasps her hands together, mock-pleading. “Oh, please. We can keep a secret, can’t we, folks?”

Her heart’s gone from pounding to hammering. Her ribs are starting to hurt. She feels like she can’t breathe.

Ray has never once said that something “might” make her mad without having a pretty damn good idea that it’s going to be upsetting, no matter how much he’s using it now to get the audience to eat out of his hand. He didn’t just say that for dramatic effect. He’s trying to warn her that she won’t like what she hears.

She sends him a frightened look. _What are you going to say?_

He just looks back at her apologetically, while the audience works itself up into more of a frenzy the longer they have to wait for his answer.

Stella bites her lip, but nods for him to continue.

Ray turns back to Mackenzie, his grin coming back. This time, Stella can see that it’s a bit strained. “Here’s the deal,” he says. “Stella’s the smartest person I know, but she doesn’t know much about fighting anybody. I’m not an expert, but I’ve done my share. So when they called her name back there, I knew I had to go with her. To keep her safe.”

“That’s very sweet,” Mackenzie says. “But--”

“Sorry,” he says. “Not done.”

She snaps her jaws shut.

“I decided to volunteer at the Reaping,” Ray says, “so that I can fight for her out there. Anybody who tries to hurt her. I’m gonna fight them all, until there aren’t any left. And when it’s just us, I’m gonna send her home.”

Stella wants to throw up.

Mackenzie, of course, doesn’t get it. _How could she?_ , Stella thinks bitterly. It doesn’t fit the narrative of the people in the districts being bloodthirsty barbarians who are excited to kill each other for sport every year. Even if it did, it would still be incomprehensible to her. No one as desensitized to all this as the people in the Capitol could ever love someone that much.

She tries to put it together, anyway. “You mean _you’re_ planning to be the one that kills her?”

Ray looks at her as if she’s very stupid. “No,” he says, without humor or bravado. “I’m planning to be the one that dies.”

The buzzer goes off before anyone has a chance to recover.


	16. Chapter 16

A hush has completely descended over the studio. No one seems to know what to do after Kowalski's pronouncement. It's not the kind of thing that warrants cheers, or applause. It certainly doesn't invite much in the way of a demand to get him back to ask more questions.

Victoria doesn't know whether to admire his brilliance or hate his guts.

All she knows is that she better do something to get the Capitol's attention and fast, or no one will remember a damn thing she says.

She takes the seat next to Mackenzie King, and decides not to wait for her to ask a question. She gives her her best attempt at a feeble-looking smile, and says, "I don't think I want to follow that."

This gets a small laugh out of the audience, and Mackenzie looks like she could kiss her. "That was a bit of showstopper, wasn't it?" The audience laughs again.

Victoria holds up her thumb and forefinger an immeasurably small distance apart. "Maybe just a little bit."

Kowalski breaks the rules of the thing by calling up to her, "Sorry!"

She goes with it, calling back, "I don't forgive you!"

This gets the audience going again, and some air seems to come back into the studio. They've managed to disperse the tension. Mackenzie flashes her another bright smile, and Victoria thrills with a sense of power. If she plays it right, she can get Mackenzie to tell any story she wants about her now. She gives her the look of a co-conspirator. "I should probably make him pay for upstaging me in the arena, right?"

Mackenzie laughs. "Well, now, you pretty much have to!"

Victoria makes a mock-apologetic shrug, and calls down the row to him, "Oops! Sorry!"

Kowalski gives an exaggerated shrug, like it's an understandable mistake.

Mackenzie gives her a playful swat on the arm. "Oh, now, stop it, you two! We'll burn through your whole three minutes on the Metcalf-Kowalski comedy hour!"

Victoria looks at her innocently. "Oh, well, we wouldn't want that."

"No indeed," she says. "So why don't you tell me about you? What's Victoria Metcalf like? Besides being charming and popular, I guess." She gives an exaggerated wink.

Victoria gives a haughty smile at the camera, which she hopes boils Francis Bolt's blood. _I can be popular. I can be more popular than **you.**_ "Very simple and mysterious," she says.

"Oh, don't leave me hanging out here with that!" Mackenzie pleads.

She tilts her chin up, pert and mischievous. "Then ask me a better question."

The audience gives a goading sort of _ooh_ while Mackenzie shakes her head, grinning. "Okay. Is this gonna be your strategy in the Games?"

"Making other people work for me?" Victoria suggests. "That'd probably work very well."

"It probably will," she agrees. "Any other schemes up your sleeve?"

This is probably a habit she has left over from earlier District Four Tributes, who have always been Careers since Mackenzie's been the host. It's kind of annoying. She's never understood why everyone is so eager to tell the audience and every other Tribute exactly what their plans are. But she covers with a cool smile. "I'd hate to spoil the surprise."

"Okay, okay," Mackenzie says, hands up in surrender. "Mum's the word. How 'bout you tell us what you plan to do if you win?"

"I'll open a hospital for widows and orphans," she says. Though she is joking, she still resents it a little when the audience laughs at this. She suspects it has less to do with her constructed persona and more to do with the audience not believing that anyone would do something useful with fantastic wealth.

Mackenzie affects an air like she's playing along. "Well, you do seem very charitable."

"I am the Lady Bountiful herself," Victoria says.

"Now, now," she says, "that's the Capitol's territory!"

The audience is laughing, but Victoria recognizes it for the warning it is: No district stuff that might be depressing to the audience. 

"I suppose I never really thought about it," she says, when the laughter simmers down. "When my sister was in the Games, I guess I was looking forward to living in the new house."

This anecdote earns a sympathetic _aww._

"That's right, your sister volunteered, too," Mackenzie says. "How do you think she'd feel, if she knew where you are now?"

Victoria thinks Valerie's dead and can't care, but that probably wouldn't play well with the audience. She tries to think of a suitably sentimental answer. It's hard. Neither she nor Valerie were ever sentimental about each other. 

She looks up at the balcony containing the Gamemakers. One of them had mutilated her with mutts and left her struggling with her wounds, growing weaker and sicker, for three whole days before the boy from Twelve had finished her off. She wonders if that one is here, watching her now. If they feel bad realizing that Valerie Metcalf was a person who had a sister. 

She looks back to Mackenzie, letting herself go stone-faced. "I think she'd probably wish she could be here instead."

This earns her another _aww._ Victoria wishes it were possible for all of them to choke on it.

"I guess she would," Mackenzie says. She looks put out. Victoria suspects she was hoping for the interview to end on a high note, with the ghost of Valerie exhorting her to win. 

Victoria wouldn't have minded having that herself, but life's disappointing sometimes. 

The buzzer goes off and Victoria gives her a frosty smile as she stands to return to her chair. "Thanks for your time." 

\--- 

Fraser approaches the seat by Mackenzie so casually, Victoria almost wonders if he's aware that he's going to be on national television. It seems to her that Fraser should be affecting a more formal attitude. He has one for everything else. 

If Mackenzie notices he's unlike his usual self (from all thirty seconds that she met him), it's only to be pleased by the difference. She smiles at him far more genuinely than she has at any of the Tributes she's spoken to so far. "It's nice to see you again, Bento." 

"Ben _ton,_ " he reminds her, and ah, there's the formal boy Victoria knows. "Or just Fraser, if you prefer." 

"How military," she says. If it's supposed to be a joke to get the audience going again, it doesn't work. They seem unnerved by how stiff he is. "Is that the usual way in District Four?" 

"Not in my experience," he says. "But it is what my mentor and my district partner have taken to calling me." He leans forward a little to wave at Victoria. 

She buries a snicker and waves back. 

Mackenzie pounces on the first material she gets. "So the two of you have been bonding, then, huh? Is it a year of romance in the Hunger Games?" 

The audience oohs, so of course, Fraser takes away this entertainment factor just as quickly as he offered it. "I really couldn't say. I like and respect Victoria very much, but I suspect I'm not to her tastes. She spent a rather long time avoiding me on the train." 

Well, at least it gets a laugh. 

"I guess there's no accounting for taste," she says. She looks him up and down. "If you were five years older..." 

Another ooh. And another possible point of interest Fraser feels the need to scuttle. "If I were five years older, I would not have been eligible to volunteer for this year's Games, and we would never have met." 

Mackenzie shakes her head. "You really like to stand on ceremony, don't you?" 

"Only when the occasion calls for it, ma'am." 

He's dying out there, Victoria thinks. 

Mackenzie rubs her temple like she's getting a headache. "Okay, then. Let's get down to business. Why don't we talk about the Games?" 

Fraser scratches at one of his eyebrows, which Victoria is starting to notice as a nervous tic for him. Even if he wasn't, the face he's making is distinctly uncomfortable. "I'm afraid I can't do that, ma'am." 

A low hum of confused whispers starts spreading around the audience. Victoria cringes, and looks for Thatcher. She's sitting in the mentors section, looking perfectly composed, save for how tightly she's holding the hand of the red-headed mentor from District Three, who looks like she's thinking of trying to pry it off. 

Mackenzie just blinks. "I'm sorry," she says. "What?" 

"I'm afraid I can't talk about the Games," he says. "I was- somewhat indirectly- advised by my mentor not to." 

In the audience, Thatcher's hand tightens on the other woman's so much that her knuckles turn white. 

"Really?" Mackenzie says, looking nonplussed. "That's- I'm not sure what to say to that." 

"We can certainly discuss anything else you might like to," Fraser offers. "Any hobbies or interests you have, for instance." 

She's looking less and less happy to have him on her stage by the second. "That's not really--" she starts, then sighs. "Maybe you'd like to tell me about how you're enjoying the Capitol?" 

"Oh, very well, thank you," he says. He doesn't elaborate. 

Mackenzie struggles. "Made any new friends?" 

"I should like to think that all of my fellow Tributes are my friends," Fraser says. "Within reason, of course." 

"Well, of course, within reason," she says, rubbing at her temple again. 

Victoria revises her opinion. Mackenzie's the one that's dying out there. 

Fraser gives his host a polite look. "Was there anything else?" 

She gestures feebly. "Would you care to tell me what you're enjoying in the Capitol?" 

"The company," he says. 

Mackenzie goes from rubbing one temple to trying to be subtle about spreading her hand across her hairline to rub both. "Anyone's company in particular?" 

"No," he says. "I've enjoyed interacting with everyone I've met. It's been very educational." 

"Educational," she repeats. 

"Oh, yes," Fraser says. "For example, did you know that the horses that pull the chariots in the Tribute parade are over twenty years old? I was very surprised to learn that they have a lifespan that long. My nearest experience to anything like horses has been with dogs--" 

The buzzer goes off. Victoria thinks she hears Mackenzie mutter, "Oh, thank goodness," before she beams at the audience. "Benton Fraser, from District Four, everyone!" 

Fraser gives her and the audience each a polite nod before he heads back to his seat. 

_Well,_ Victoria thinks, _he probably didn't get any new sponsors out of that._ She considers further. _But at least he probably didn't lose any, either._


	17. Chapter 17

Ray Vecchio may be the only non-Career Tribute in the entire Capitol who isn't nervous about his pre-Games interview. 

He doesn't have much in the way of a plan, per se. He hasn't got any allies to namedrop or skills to brag about, and his strategy for the Games themselves is mostly to stay with Irene for as long as possible. (The previous strategy of trying to sell everyone on their love story died sometime around when it was obvious to everybody in training that their romance is a pre-existing condition, but he doesn't mind that too much; he hadn't thought much of that plan in the first place.)

The sad and simple truth is, he's just looking forward to being on TV without being naked and covered in coal dust, or running around the woods pounding other kids' faces in until they die. It strikes him as possibly being fun. Just a moment of being considered worth giving airtime to. Getting three minutes to be a famous person, before his name is just another on the list of dead Tributes or live victors. He's feeling pretty zen about it.

Irene... is not so zen.

Maybe it's stage fright, maybe it's the ever-growing sense of impending doom (there are twelve hours left on the clock before they'll be sent into the Games), maybe it's that same thing that's been eating away at her since she got here. Ray's found it's pretty much impossible to be sure.

But ever since the preps set themselves on her to get her ready for this whole shebang, she's been getting quieter and quieter, drawing more and more in on herself. She didn't even crack a smile when Stella waved at her in line.

It's worrying.

Ray wishes he had brought a paper and pencil with him. Maybe he could've discreetly passed her a note. Frankie's reaction after would've been hilarious.

Lacking the proper utensils, he settles for holding her hand.

The other interviews seem to go on for an eternity. The Careers bore the pants off everybody with their usual schtick (look at me, I'm crazier than a craphouse rat!), while Stella clams up so hard that she sounds like she's being interviewed for the school paper right up until she panics and tries, a little poorly, to be sassy. Kowalski shakes things up a bit by harshing everybody's buzz (and putting the final nail in the coffin of the romance strategy- it'd just look like they were trying to copy him now), and Victoria pretty nicely twists it to make her seem like best friends with everybody, even though she hardly said two words to them in training. Fraser comes off like a total nutbar, but maybe that works in the Capitol. (He can picture several headlines in gossip rags that lede with, "Eccentric District Four victor, Benton Fraser.")

At least he doesn't come off as bad as Kuzma, who gets his mic cut and his interview dropped when he starts describing how he'd defile the other Tributes' corpses.

Six has the first of the duck boys, who apparently considers it a great injustice that he was dressed as a pill bottle during the parade (not because it was a stupid costume- though it was- but because he's not a chemist; his parents own a grocery store).

The girl from Seven is nice, but tough (her favorite things are kids and axes, provided they're nowhere near each other), while her district partner is such a space cadet, he makes Fraser look normal by comparison.

By the time Eight's done, Ray's starting to feel the pressure of sitting up straight and not fidgeting (a pressure Kowalski seems to have caved under), and by the time Nine's finished, he wishes that these were filmed individually in the Training Center apartments.

Ray tunes out Duck Boy #3 from District Ten in order to glance around the audience for a while. Most of them are so outlandish-looking as to be indistinguishable from one another (when everybody's weird, no one is), and the only ones that really stand out to him are the victors and the Gamemakers.

Welsh and Frankie are there, of course. Frank's leaning forward in his seat like he's watching the clock and willing it to go faster so he can see his sister shine, while Welsh is sitting proper, looking attentive. He doesn't really look like he's _enjoying_ the interviews. Ray thinks he's just trying to be respectful of the Tributes.

The Ice Queen- Fraser and Victoria's mentor- is also there, looking very much like she's going to strangle one of her Tributes once they get out of here. Stella and Ray's mentor, a slightly snooty-looking redhead, is trying, unsuccessfully, to calm her.

The Gamemakers catch his eye when they start whispering amongst themselves and walking in and out of their box. The audience is never shown in the broadcast in District Twelve, so he could be wrong, but this strikes him as weird. The Tributes are scored and the arena's done, there shouldn't be much for them to be at panic stations over. And yet there's a weird kind of charge to the way they're talking and moving- like there's something important going on.

Ray watches them all for the whole of District Ten's interviews, and the start of District Eleven's. They walk out as one halfway through Mackenzie asking Elaine if she can touch her hair.

Irene's hand tightens on his- she's next after Duck Boy #3- and he's just opening his mouth to whisper to her, _Hey, what do you think that's about?_ when the studio lights go off.

His heart starts to pound when the audience starts crying out in alarm. This is clearly not part of the regularly scheduled Slaughterhouse Special that just gets edited out in District Twelve. He doesn't like it. 

He's just starting to think about taking this opportunity to get up and flee when the giant screen behind the Capitol skyline that makes up Mackenzie's backdrop flickers on, filling up with the face of some person he doesn't recognize, but who must be important, judging by the audience's gasps.

"Greetings, citizens of the Capitol and districts of Panem," the man on the screen says, giving them all a wide, toothy smile. "We apologize for the interruption, and would like to take this time before our announcement to wish a very Happy Hunger Games to our Tributes."

Ray doesn't know who he is, but he decides he hates him.

"In this spirit of this greeting, we would also like to apologize to the Tributes from District Eleven and District Twelve, who am I afraid will not be able to give their interviews at this time--"

...oh, yeah. Ray hates him.

"--due to a scheduling conflict with our transport team. This year, we have designed a very special arena, which will require a longer than usual journey before our Tributes arrive at their final destination. Mentors, escorts, and stylists: at this time, you must collect your Tributes and report to the launch center immediately. Please be advised that any delays on your part will result in a delay of the Games themselves, which is a class five actionable offense against the Capitol. So please, arrive on time! Thank you. Again and as always, may the odds be ever in your favor!"

The screen flickers out at the same time that some of the stage lights come back on, and before Ray can even begin to get his heartbeat under control, there's a veritable stampede of mentors running for the stage.

Frankie is shoving his way around audience members and jumping from empty chair to empty chair to try and get around the pack. Welsh and Moffat are trailing after him, looking harried. Welsh seems to be swearing a blue streak under his breath.

Irene is shell-shocked and on the verge of panic when Frankie grabs her arm and starts dragging her to the stage entrance. Ray is pulled along, still holding her hand.

"What the hell happened?" he asks. "This isn't the program!"

"No, it's fucking not," Frank snarls, "and I am going to find whoever the hell's idea this was and introduce him to the blunt side of the biggest Goddamn rock I can lift--"

"Calm down, Frank," Welsh says, puffing along behind them.

"Can it, Harding- this isn't in the protocol! My sister was supposed to get her three minutes, just like everyone else, and they're cutting ‘em off because they can't read a fucking calendar! How the hell am I supposed to get her sponsors now?"

"Angles and connections," Welsh says, "same as every year. I'll even bank whatever I get for the kid with you if it'll make you shut the hell up."

"I don't understand," Irene says. "Don't they know by now how long the trip takes?" She's stumbling to keep up with Frankie, and looks like she just might faint.

"Normally, they do," Welsh answers for him. "But they planned something extra this year, and probably some important paperwork somewhere got lost."

"Don't you get shot for that in the Capitol?" Ray jokes.

Welsh looks terribly serious. "It's possible. They're probably going to pay for this. The audience gets spooked when the routine gets disrupted. Someone's gonna lose their job, that's for sure."

"I, for one, will be putting in a formal complaint," Moffat says. "Class five actionable offense, my foot. They failed to do their due diligence."

"Fucking right, they did," Frankie growls.

"It doesn't matter now," Welsh says. "We just need to get them down to that launchpad."

Getting out of the studio and out to the car is much harder than getting in was. The backstage door is swamped with Capitol groupies, all screaming and trying to get their hands on them as they pass. Frank forgets about his reputation as a charmer so he can shove people out of the way. Ray wonders if he can get arrested for that.

Their driver doesn't even wait for all of their doors to be closed before taking off at breakneck speeds.

 _I'm going to the Hunger Games now,_ Ray thinks, his heart beating a tattoo against his ribcage. _I'm going to be stuck in a hovercraft and sent who knows where and expected to fight and kill or maybe die in this condition._

He's not ready for this. He thought he'd go after getting a chance to charm up some sponsors, say one last goodbye to his family on the broadcast, maybe go over strategy with Welsh and sleep on the couch with Irene one last time.

Irene's even more freaked out than he is. She's hyperventilating so hard that Moffat actually offers her one of the happy pills half the Games' staff seems to be carrying around at any given time. ("It's against the rules," he admits. "But this was a flagrant violation of the trust between Hunger Games' staff members.")

Ray runs his hands back wildly through his hair. "What are we gonna do?"

"We're gonna get there," Welsh says, in his deep, calming voice. "Then you two are gonna get dressed in your arena uniforms, because they probably aren't going to want to send designer label stuff out with you on a trip to God knows where. Then you're gonna get there, and do your damnedest to stay alive."

"How do I do that?" Ray asks. "What am I supposed to do when I'm there?"

"You're supposed to kill people, you dumbass," Frank says, rolling his eyes.

Welsh holds up a hand to silence him. "You're gonna avoid the Cornucopia. That's the first thing. All the Careers are gonna be running for it at the same time, and you're not going to have a chance if you try to fight them."

Frank's expression sours. "I almost had Toe Blake sold on signing Irene as an ally. He wanted to see how she did in her interview first!"

"Frank," he says warningly.

Frankie puts up his hands in indignant surrender.

"Next," Welsh says, "you find yourself a place to hide. Near water, if you can."

Hiding. Water. Not running for the Cornucopia. He can do that. "What about a weapon?"

"Make one," he says. "Improvise. It's easy if you try."

Fingers of chill slide down Ray's spine as he realizes this is probably what Welsh told Frankie before he scored all of his kills with a rock.

"Any other bright ideas?" he asks.

Welsh shakes his head. "Best I got."

Ray closes his eyes. "Okay," he says.

They manage to arrive at the launch pad in time, but only just. Welsh claps him on the shoulder. Frank hugs Irene impossibly tight. Their stylists change them into outfits that scream "half of you are gonna freeze to death." (Long pants made of heat-reflecting material. Long-sleeved black shirts made of same. Fur-lined boots. Long, heavy, fur-lined jackets.)

No one is allowed to board the hovercraft with them. It doesn't even have a proper pilot- just a grey-green remote control service droid. Once they're on the ship, they're completely alone.

He grabs Irene and pulls her as close as he can. She grabs him back.

"I don't want to die, Ray," Irene whispers into his neck. "I don't want to kill people."

He closes his eyes and kisses her hair, and whispers a promise he can't keep.

"Everything's going to be okay."


	18. Chapter 18

In a cordoned off wing, deep under the Capitol's gleaming television broadcasting studio, is the second most important room for the behind-the-scenes work of the Games.

It's a giant space, with the subtle, sloping curvature of a beehive- a minuscule domed ceiling that arcs out into a generous antechamber before tapering off to the floor. The walls are patterned with geometric shapes to accent this, with a platform built across the widest part. This platform is home to a horseshoe-shaped group of small, bowed tables, varying in size to accommodate the ever in-flux number of people who have to sit there. The wall directly across from this is made up of nothing but dozens of screens, tiled together in a way that- when these screens are active- is painful to the eyes when it is looked at for too long.

Meg Thatcher finds this appropriate. The content of those screens is no less painful than their configuration.

This is the Viewing Center. The home of the live feed- raw and unedited- of all the footage of the Hunger Games.

This is where, every year, the mentors of the Games go to watch their Tributes fight and die.

Meg has been here only once before. While technically, only the active mentors are supposed to enter the enclave, every crowned victor can be swapped in for their teammates to take a shift answering sponsor calls, and arranging gifts for the Tributes- either off a Gamemaker-approved list when they've been given a donation, or according to a sponsor's wishes, when they have a present in mind. (Meg disapproves of this, and wishes desperately that there were rules against it. What sponsors think Tributes need and what Tributes actually need are separated by a bridge too far, and never the twain shall meet.)

Last year, she had done a four-hour shift substituting for Gerard Malone, and had the bad luck of being the one on-staff when one of their Tributes died. As the witnessing victor, it had been her duty to call the poor girl's parents.

Her agreeing to be the mentor this year had hinged largely on the fact that neither of their current Tributes had parents.

"Are you okay to be back here?" Louise asks, startling her out of her reverie.

Meg scowls. She had hoped that she was covering her feelings about those memories better than that. "I'm perfectly all right," she says. "I had merely forgotten how ugly the interior design of this room is."

Louise scoffs, but doesn't argue. "Hideous, but I think it's apt this year."

All around them, other mentors and escorts are steeped hip-deep in phone calls and paperwork. Lolla from Eleven is frantically calling every sponsor she's ever had an agreement with to try and scrape up someone willing to donate for Jack, or at least willing to transfer their donations to him in the likely event that Elaine dies. Since his interview minutes were preempted last night, all she has to convince them with is his individual assessment score and his appearances at the Reaping and the Tribute parade. It's remarkably little to sell to a sponsor, and Meg doesn't envy the job. 

She's not the only one- Welsh from Twelve is trying to make the same calls, while Frank has entered into a bidding war with Will Kelly from Ten over who is more deserving of a formal alliance with Two. (Meg doesn't see the point of this. The Tributes will befriend whoever they befriend in the arena. Whatever agreements their mentors sign are usually broken within the first half hour.) Both of their escorts are involved in telephoned shouting matches with the Gamemakers. 

"It's complete chaos in here," Meg says, shaking her head.

Louise laughs, casually carding her fingers through Meg's hair. "It's always a little like this the first day," she says. "Why don't you get a nap in the tubes? The Games don't start for a while yet." She gives her a suggestive smile. "Maybe I'll join you later."

Meg gives her a fondly exasperated look. "That would be entirely inappropriate."

She lets out a derisive snort. "I just delivered the Tribute who made a romantic suicide pledge on national television," she says. "What on earth convinced you that District Three has the word ‘appropriate'?"

"One of mine babbled banal small talk at the camera until the buzzer went off," Meg says. "What on earth convinced _you_ we'll surrender our forms to functions?"

All the same, she pinches Louise's hip before she goes to her station.

The screen at her station is, of course, turned on but blank. It will be nothing but dead air until the Games begin. She wonders which of her Tributes it will default to when it first boots up. (She can't do more than wonder. It's forbidden, both in the actual rules of the Games and in the general culture of the mentors, to express any preference between the two.)

Louise takes her seat at her own station, fiddling a little with the position of her screen. "So," she says, "now that the Games are starting and my Tributes have flown the nest, do I finally get to hear about what they're like?"

"You'll see what they're like in a matter of minutes," Meg reminds her.

"At the Cornucopia," she says, rolling her eyes. "That won't tell me much of anything."

"I'm sorry to disappoint," Meg says. "But I hardly know anything more about them than their names and ages."

"Almost nothing?" Louise repeats, raising her eyebrows.

"Most of the salient points were covered in their interviews," she says.

Louise laughs. "Ouch."

"Fifteen minutes to launch!" This declaration comes from an apprentice Gamemaker, hanging halfway out of a telephone booth near the back wall.

Meg takes a breath and turns her eyes towards her paperwork. Her sponsor list is smaller this year than Gerard's was last year. The Capitol doesn't seem to know what to make of her Tributes. As many as were impressed by the "leaked security footage" of Victoria's display with the knives, an equal number attributed the success to the boy from District One, and were putting their money on him. Fraser's appeal is largely confined to people who think he looked very beautiful in his parade costume. (Meg accepted as little of this money as possible. On the off chance that Fraser manages to win, she doesn't want him to be saddled with that kind of sponsor's idea of a thank you. She often wishes her own mentor had thought ahead that far for her.)

Out of the corner of her eye, she can see Welsh getting off the phone and setting his table to hover. It follows him all the way up the row to Louise's station.

"Hello, Harding," Meg greets him.

"Hello, Meg," he says. "Louise."

Louise sighs. "Are we really going to do this?" she asks. "Odds are, they won't see each past the Cornucopia." She purses her lips, like she's insulted. "Your Tributes weren't even certain about mine, as I recall."

"My Tribute- singular- was pretty inclined towards the idea," Welsh says. "If they're gonna be a team, I'd rather pool our resources now, to give them their best chance."

"What resources do you have?" she asks.

"Louise," Meg says, frowning.

"It's not an impolite question, Meg."

"Not much," he admits. "But they're young, they're attractive, they're in love--"

"So are mine," Louise laughs.

"We do have the power here to combine their stories," Welsh says. "For maximum impact."

"That's not as much to your benefit as you might assume, Harding," Meg says, before Louise can answer. "Her Tribute just pledged to kill himself to save his girlfriend on national television. Yours is going to look like the villain compared to hers."

Louise smiles brightly at him. "On second thought, welcome aboard."

Welsh gives them both a sidelong look, but locks his table to the other side of Louise's. He settles himself in a chair and starts thumbing through his papers. "Either of you heard what's up with this arena?"

"No," Meg says. "It's troubling me. Have you?"

He shakes his head. "Sorry. I asked around a little before you got here, they just keep saying that it's special and we should wait to be surprised."

"Tch." Meg scowls again. "I don't suppose it makes any difference to them that the more details we have, the better chance of keeping our Tributes alive."

Welsh looks surprised. Louise, on the other hand, laughs again. "Meg," she says. "Did it ever?"

Her cheeks burn with embarrassment and she focuses on shuffling through her already-organized sponsorship contracts.

"Is she okay to do this?" Welsh asks, as if she isn't there.

"I asked," Louise says. "She lied. So probably not, but it's too late to do much about it."

She grits her teeth and glares at them. "I can handle myself just fine, thank you."

Welsh gives her a sympathetic look. "It's okay to not be ready," he says. "I wasn't, the first time."

"Please don't talk to me like I'm one of your Tributes," Meg says sharply. She shoves her sponsorship papers down with more violence than is strictly necessary. "I just want to know what's so special about this arena that they've thrown all of us into a tizzy. I had no opportunity to bid a proper farewell to my Tributes, and I've been fielding calls from the press all night asking me for details that they should logically know I don't have! Why don't they chase down the Gamemakers, if they're so desperate to know?"

Louise wraps an arm around her shoulders. "Meg," she says.

Wonderful. Now they're even more worried. "I'm fine," she says. "I just would have appreciated a little more consideration. All I want now is to see my Tributes through launch, and, if at all possible, through the Games."

"Everyone wants that, Meg," Welsh says.

She gives him a look. "No, Harding. Everyone wants that for their own Tributes."

No one contests this.

Under the table, Louise rubs her hand up and down Meg's thigh. She decides to risk resting her head on Louise's shoulder.

She doesn't like the Games this year. There's been something off about them from the get-go, and she can't articulate to anyone exactly why. There's nothing unusual about a mentor not getting to spend much time with her Tributes. Certainly nothing out of place about the Gamemakers being dramatic and mysterious about the arena. If there's a higher than normal number of merchant kids this year, that just shows the randomization of the Reaping is working. And if the arena is in a more distant and exotic location than in the past, it's probably down to the fact that decommissioned arenas are such hot spots for Capitolite tourism that they want the journey itself to be justifiably more costly to holidaymakers.

But all the same. Something feels rotten.

 _Probably all first year mentors feel this way,_ she thinks. _It's the damage from our own Games still lingering._

(Meg knows that she is damaged from her Games. She had, by all accounts, a tour of duty that was perfectly typical: she stayed with the Career pack until they were the only ones left, and then they all said their goodbyes, bowed to each other just as though they were about to spar in school, then politely killed each other. The whole thing took less than fifteen minutes. They called her the Ice Queen afterwards because of her flat, frozen affect the entire time she was murdering her friends.

They _were_ her friends. That was probably where she made her mistake.)

At the front of the antechamber, the screens all simultaneously light up with the same enormous image, fitted together like puzzle pieces: the logo for the Games.

Her breath hitches. It's about to start.

"Welcome," an announcer's voice booms, echoing throughout the beehive room with so much bass that it feels like the soundwaves are beating directly against her heart, "to the Eighty-First Annual Hunger Games!"

Meg sits bolt upright and grabs Louise's hand as hard as she can. Louise squeezes back.

"You've seen them fight," the announcer intones dramatically as the screen switches to a montage of earlier Games: a teenaged Welsh grapples on the edge of a cliff with a Tribute whose face cannot be seen; Lolla fends off a Career with a large piece of drift wood; Meg herself, blank and emotionless, in a whirling swordfight with three Tributes at once.

"You've seen them win," the announcer continues. Another montage: Louise drowns a Tribute- judging by the long hair, a girl- in a pool of shallow, brown water in the middle of a jungle; Muldoon in the now-legendary Murderer's Quell, repeatedly stabbing an adult prison inmate drafted just for this awful purpose; Frank Zuko, bloody-faced and laughing, dashes out the brains of Meg's own Tribute's sister.

"Now," the announcer says, "this year- a new champion will emerge. Who will be the one?"

The montage this time occurs in a split screen: video on one side of the Tributes at the parade or in training, on the other side a headshot of each one with their names and district numbers. Victoria practices with her knives beside a picture of her in her Reaping dress, looking haughty and arrogant. For Fraser, they cobble together an intense moment of focus as he lights a campfire in the Training Center (the younger Tributes he was instructing in how to do it have been removed from the frame) while he looks distant and stoic in his portrait. (Meg is nauseated to recognize that the picture is from his father's funeral.)

The whole thing finishes off with a shot of Welsh's Tribute laughing and smiling with Louise's in the Training Center, contrasted with him looking dumbfounded at the Reaping. Welsh looks displeased.

"Now," says the announcer, "let the Eighty-First Annual Hunger Games begin!"

The screen changes into the grainier, more washed-out footage of a Tribute point of view cam inside a blank, white room. She thinks at first that it's the regular launch room of a typical arena, but then she realizes that the tubes they're stepping into are lowering to the ground, not rising up from beneath it. They're being dropped in from the hovercraft.

Meg shoots a confused look to Louise, who doesn't notice her; she's looking cold and calculating. Welsh looks puzzled as well, and gives Meg a hell-if-I-know shrug when he catches her watching.

For a moment, there is nothing on the screens but yellow-white light and rainbowy lens flare as the sun overwhelms the shot.

 _This is it,_ Meg thinks, leaning closer, her heart trying to pound its way out of her chest. _This is when we see their extra-special arena._

When the camera resolves and she gets her first clear glimpse of the landscape, Meg can't help letting out a gasp.

The Cornucopia (made this year from stacked logs, like a Peacekeeper outpost cabin) is sitting in the middle of several yards of blinding white. The surrounding landscape is dotted here, there, and all about with beautiful green firs, blue spruces, silver pines, and black cedars, all of them draped in little white blankets, too. There's a long river that winds its way through the entire arena, slushy but flowing in several places, and in others, completely frozen over.

It's an arctic wasteland, so cold that all of the Tributes' breath is already making a heavy fog across the lines as they wait on their platforms for the gong to sound.

All of the other mentors are looking at her- at least, the ones who aren't groaning or swearing- and Meg knows it'd be inappropriate, perhaps even a betrayal of her friendship with all of these people, for her to smile, but...

Louise leans over from the table for District Three and puts a hand on her shoulder. "It's okay," she says. "You can think it. Say it, even, if you want. No one will hold it against you."

Meg squeezes Louise's hand and stares in wonder at the arena, then looks down at her personal screen, trained on Victoria, who seems to be having the same reaction Meg is.

She doesn't have call to say this often, at least not in relation to anything she ever sees in the Games or the Capitol, but Meg says it aloud now. "Oh, thank you," she whispers. She looks up at the ceiling, for the cameras where the Gamemakers are undoubtedly watching, and whispers it again. "Thank you."

The gong goes off, announcing the beginning of the Eighty-First Annual Hunger Games, and Meg's Tribute goes sprinting for the Cornucopia.

Meg squeezes Louise's hand again and feels more gratitude wash over her like a warm wave. 

"They gave her an arena she can survive," is what she says to Louise and the other mentors close enough to hear.

But what she thinks is, _They gave her an arena she can win._

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Tributes](https://archiveofourown.org/works/2298452) by [mific](https://archiveofourown.org/users/mific/pseuds/mific)




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